July 2021 Summaries

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a collection of tech and tools that a platform engineering team binds together to pave golden paths for developers, lowering cognitive load across the organization and enabling developer self-service. A well-designed IDP follows a Platform as a Product approach, where a platform team builds, maintains, and continuously improves the IDP, following product management principles and best practices. An IDP is not an end-to-end DevOps platform or a tool that covers single parts of the software delivery lifecycle or infrastructure provisioning; it's built out of different tools and technologies and might include developer portals but doesn't come as an out-of-the-box solution. An IDP covers foundations such as infrastructure orchestration, application configuration, deployment management, environment management, and RBAC. When well-designed and built, an IDP is a compelling product that lets platform teams "make the right thing [to do] the intuitive thing," increasing developer productivity and velocity.

Puppet's latest State of DevOps Report highlights the growth of DevOps and platform engineering, with over 35,000 technical professionals worldwide contributing to its research. The report found that high-performing teams can release software more frequently due to automation and collaborative working methods, while also enjoying greater system stability. Puppet's research suggests that internal platform teams are becoming increasingly important, providing a platform for application development teams to build, deploy, and run their applications. However, many companies struggle to scale DevOps practices without investing in platform teams, as they face fundamental constraints specific to their organization and industry. The report also emphasizes the importance of self-service, automation, and a product mindset in scaling DevOps effectiveness. With an API-first approach becoming increasingly relevant, customers are embracing approaches like IFTTT to solve problems creatively. Finally, Puppet's report notes that security teams should work closely with platform teams to collaborate around design and function, aiming for continuous compliance. As the industry shifts towards a post-DevOps world, focusing on the work being done instead of labels becomes increasingly important.