As a developer who has worked on multiple projects and teams, I'm often asked - what are IDPs, and why should organizations invest in building them? Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) have become mission-critical hubs empowering modern software teams by providing developers self-service access to environments, tools, and knowledge needed to build applications efficiently. IDPs centralize tools and workflows for developer efficiency, offering benefits such as visibility, standardization, and faster releases. They seamlessly combine capabilities like unified access portals, identity and access management, standardized tooling, environment provisioning, infrastructure management, deployment automation, monitoring and observability into a frictionless developer experience. For Engineering Leaders, IDPs give visibility into team workflows and help enforce organizational standards, while for platform teams, they enable self-service workflows by simplifying provisioning, and for developers, they eliminate wasted time configuring tools and environments. Notable providers of IDPs include Spotify's Backstage, Port, Cortex, Rely, Configure8, Humanitec, Atlassian's Compass, Cycloid, OpsLevel, and Harness, each bringing distinct strengths to the table. Launching an IDP requires a methodical approach, including incrementally rolling out capabilities starting with developer pain points, involving users early and gathering continuous feedback, incentivizing usage by highlighting productivity gains, integrating with existing systems, building internal champions, planning for scale and high availability, and continuously adapting and improving based on monitoring usage patterns and feedback. As software delivery grows more complex, IDPs will only increase in strategic value, becoming even more intelligent and integrated into engineering workflows to unlock unprecedented productivity, scale, and reliability.