Blog
10 min
The 2025 Buyer’s Guide to Internal Developer Platforms
A Critical Review for Platform Teams
Jonathan Xavier
Content Strategist
Jan 10, 2025
Modern software development rarely stays simple. As soon as you have multiple teams, varied tech stacks, or a push for faster releases, the need for greater consistency and visibility explodes.
In response, many engineering organizations seek an Internal Developer Platform (IDP): a centralized, self-service, and policy-driven ecosystem to help developers focus on writing code without being mired in operational overhead.
If you’re reading this buyer’s guide, you’ve probably experienced a friction point—maybe your ops team is overloaded with provisioning requests, or your leadership wants better visibility into the hundreds of services your engineering teams use.
With today’s renewed focus on engineering efficiency, these are highly visible challenges—the kind where a good solution can be the cornerstone of a team’s reputation or an individual contributor’s advancement. IDPs promise to deliver a holistic answer. But not all platforms are the same, which can make assessing your needs and mapping them to what’s on the market a confusing affair.
This guide will walk you through what an IDP is, how organizations typically realize they need one, and the core features (and vendors) you should evaluate to find the right fit.
What Is an Internal Developer Platform?
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a set of tools, automations, and self-service capabilities that streamline the entire software lifecycle—from writing code to deploying and operating it. It replaces countless developer islands with a unified set of tooling and a consistent way of accessing it. IDPs aren’t all alike, and there’s a lot of variability to how certain problem domains are addressed and how much can be accomplished without a lot of aftermarket tinkering. In particular, a distinction exists between modern hosted IDPs and open-source toolkits, with the latter requiring a lot of setup and maintenance overhead. But all IDPs will offer some combination of the following.
A Central Catalog/Inventory of services, applications, or infrastructure resources.
Unified Workflows and Developer Self-Service standardize the steps for provisioning environments, requesting new infrastructure, and deploying software, and makes them available to developers directly without needing manual attention from DevOps. This is the area with the most variability in platform coverage—some platforms include this as a key feature, some require extensive building and maintenance of automation pipelines, and some support automation only through the integration of third-party plugins.
Guardrails for Security and Compliance, so that best practices are automatically enforced.
Scalability, allowing teams of all sizes to handle bursts of new services or handle major growth without tying up ops in a request queue.
By giving developers an intuitive interface (web portal, CLI, or API) and automated backend workflows, an IDP can significantly reduce overhead and confusion. This “single source of truth” also makes it easier for leadership to see how resources are allocated, who owns what, and whether the organization is operating efficiently.
A Bit of IDP History — How We Got Here
For decades, software teams managed large, monolithic apps on servers in a data center. Then came cloud computing, DevOps practices, microservices, containers, and a massive proliferation of specialized third-party tools. Over time, these evolutions made life easier in some respects (e.g., no more managing individual pet servers) but also created a sprawling operational landscape.
DevOps attempted to unify development and operations by shifting operational tasks “left,” putting more responsibility on developers. This made a certain amount of sense—because there are so many ways to build software, developers can have such diverse needs that the only people qualified to build tooling tailored to the way they work is themselves.
But when you scale the problem beyond individual developer productivity to addressing how large teams of developers work together, problems begin to emerge. Having devs build and maintain their own tooling increases velocity but also introduces “automation islands”: each team might build its own Terraform scripts or CI/CD pipelines, rarely sharing code or standards with other teams.
Eventually, large companies recognized that providing a centralized “developer portal” or “developer platform” was necessary to mitigate chaos and reduce overhead. Spotify, for instance, open-sourced its portal (Backstage), which served as an early blueprint for many of today’s vendor offerings.
With the recent tightening of capital, there’s more pressure than ever on tech companies to run lean—and that puts developer platforms in the spotlight. Everyone wants to link infrastructure costs to real business outcomes, but it’s surprisingly tough to answer one basic question: “What’s actually running in all these cloud environments, and what does it do?” The finance team might see all the invoices, but they’re too far from the day-to-day to know what’s delivering ROI. Only a robust developer platform delivers visibility while bridging the gap with real usage so as to make efficiency programs more than just guesswork.
How do I know I need an Internal Developer Platform?
Here are some of the warning signs that it might be time to think about an IDP, and how a good platform can help you address them:
Overloaded Ops Queues
As development teams and areas of responsibility proliferate, companies add DevOps positions to deal with the additional complexity. Yet these specialized roles are in high demand, and the teams don’t usually scale at the same speed as the rest of the org—in a large enterprise, it’s not uncommon for a mere dozen Ops people to be serving thousands of developers. When these teams have to manually provision resources, even when most of the steps are automated, it creates bottlenecks that can leave dev teams waiting days, weeks, or months for infrastructure. An advanced developer platform with robust self-service features takes Ops roles out of the approval path for routine things. That not only speeds up dev teams, but lets ops teams focus on higher-value problems than just clearing the queue.Slow Incident Response Due to Obscure Ownership Structure
Who owns which service? If something goes down, how do you know whom to page? More importantly, when that person inevitably determines that the service they own is broken because of something upstream, who do they page? Many organizations struggle to answer these questions, and their accountability schemes often fail in a crisis, leading them to waste precious hours navigating obscure and outdated ownership charts rather than knuckling down to solve the outage. IDPs typically provide a service catalog that maps ownership, dependencies, and relevant configurations, and that updates these things automatically. This proves essential for incident response, architectural planning, or compliance audits. More complete solutions also aid in making sense of downstream and upstream dependencies across the whole service chain, to help establish the “blast radius” of adverse events so teams can collaborate efficiently to fix them.Trouble With Standardization & Governance
Once you have multiple teams with autonomy over their stacks, it becomes difficult to enforce consistent security, compliance, or cost-control measures. In smaller organizations, this kind of compliance is managed mostly through manual processes like code reviews and written rules and documentation. This does not scale, however, and most companies eventually begin to orchestrate this through automated quality assurance and infrastructure as code tools. The only problem? Those tools are themselves usually also code that has to be maintained, which only intensifies the compliance burdens. An IDP can help tame the chaos while enforcing best practices automatically, letting platform engineers define configuration “templates” that remain flexible but safe.Cost & Efficiency Pressures
As organizations grow, so do cloud bills. C-level leadership wants to see what’s driving cost and how to reduce it. An IDP surfaces real usage across multiple clouds or onprem resources, letting you apply consistent policies or highlight underutilized services.Slow Time-to-Market & Infrequent Releases
Dev teams often get blamed for poor productivity metrics and a sluggish release cadence, but the real problem is often upstream from them. If engineers are hamstrung by a lack of clarity about resources and have to wait ages to get access even when they know what they need, is it any wonder productivity suffers? By creating frictionless pathways for tasks (provisioning resources, updating dependencies, shipping releases), an IDP boosts velocity. Developers can focus on what they’re hired to do—write and ship code—instead of wrestling with operational complexity.
Although your current pain points will determine your initial priorities and how you’ll gauge your near term success, it’s important to understand that addressing them is just the first step in the journey. A successfully implemented IDP will become the core of your developer infrastructure—and if it doesn’t, that’s a sign that it wasn’t successfully implemented. Your IDP will need to evolve with you, so it needs to be capable of evolving.
That makes it critical that you implement it with an eye to your next problem, and then the one after that. Many organizations initially want a “developer portal” for visibility—only to realize that, next, they want to take action with true developer self-service and automated infrastructure provisioning. If you suspect you’ll eventually need to solve these bigger problems, invest in a platform that can grow with you.
What’s the difference between an Internal Developer Portal and an Internal Developer Platform?
Developer portals and developer platforms are closely related products, and they’re often conflated in DevOps discussions. This is only made more confusing when you consider that the most advanced platforms like Tempest also include portal functionality, or that portal providers occasionally call themselves platforms because they can integrate third-party automation plugins. But these things are distinct, and understanding that difference is important as you begin to assess your needs and how a given product will meet them.
Internal Developer Portals centralize information, documentation, and resources for developers across the organization. They have a core focus on discovery and knowledge sharing, providing a central location for internal APIs, microservices, documentation, standards, and best practices.
Internal Developer Platforms abstract operational complexity and provide self-service workflows so that developers can deploy, manage, and maintain applications without deep knowledge of the underlying infrastructure. Although platforms can aid in discovery and visibility, their main focus is automation, orchestration and environment management. They offer a “golden path” to production by encapsulating infrastructure and DevOps best practices that the organization has adopted, which help developers to create, test, deploy, and monitor applications quickly in a standardized environment.
Most organizations will eventually find that this isn’t an either/or proposition—to get the full benefits of robust internal DevOps tooling, they’ll require both a portal that makes resources discoverable and some standardized way to access their Infrastructure as Code resources and CI/CD pipelines.
Core IDP Features
Transparency & Visibility
Giving teams a clear view of all services, owners, and dependencies ensures that everyone knows who’s responsible for what, making it easier to respond to incidents and coordinate improvements.
Service Catalog: A centralized list of all applications, microservices, and other resources. This makes it simple to see what’s running where, track utilization, and streamline onboarding for new team members.
Ownership: Clear assignments of service or infrastructure ownership show exactly which team or individual is accountable for maintenance, feature additions, and incident response. This eliminates guesswork and finger-pointing when issues arise.
Relationship and Dependency Mapping: Understanding how services interact—especially in microservice architectures—helps teams manage cascading failures, plan for outages, and evaluate impact during deployments or upgrades.
Continuous Improvement
Providing systematic ways to monitor and measure software quality, security, and compliance, then automatically drive corrective action.
Governance / Scorecards / Policies: Built-in or configurable checks allow organizations to enforce best practices—like test coverage, security scans, or compliance standards—so you can identify at-risk areas and guide teams toward alignment.
Metrics Tracking: Tracking key performance indicators (such as release frequency or mean time to recovery) keeps teams informed about velocity and stability. Objective metrics also help justify investments in process or tooling improvements.
Developer Empowerment
IDPs should reduce time spent waiting on Ops by providing tools and automations that let developers focus on delivering features, not provisioning infrastructure.
Self-Serve Provisioning / Templates: Give developers the ability to spin up resources—like new environments or databases—on their own, using standardized templates that embed organizational best practices. This slashes ticket queues and speeds up delivery.
Developer-Friendly Interfaces: Whether a web portal, CLI, or API, the IDP should be intuitive. A user-friendly experience boosts adoption, keeps engineers happier, and ensures the platform doesn’t become shelf-ware.
Flexibility & Extensibility
Different organizations have diverse tech stacks and workflows, so an IDP must be adaptable and integrate easily with existing processes.
Integrations: A strong suite of connectors—covering CI/CD, infrastructure, monitoring, and more—means you don’t have to abandon tools that already work. Your IDP should play nicely with everything from Kubernetes to Terraform.
Extensibility: Mature IDPs often provide plugin ecosystems or APIs that let you extend functionality as needs evolve. This future proofs your investment and ensures you can adapt to any shift in technology or business strategy.
What kinds of Developer Platforms are on the market?
Open-Source Portals
Backstage (from Spotify)
Widely adopted, but often requires heavy lifting: you must host, configure, and extend it yourself through a plugin ecosystem. Great for custom requirements if you have the engineering muscle to build and maintain it.
Commercial Portals
Port, Cortex, etc.
These vendors provide more complete solutions, including service catalogs, scorecards, and self-service provisioning, along with dedicated support. The advantage of a commercial solution is not needing to build and maintain it yourself. However, most of these products focus on the portal aspect, while expecting automation and self-service to be accomplished by integrating additional tools.
Commercial Platforms With Built In Portals
Tempest
Tempest is the only robust offering on the market that brings together both automation and visibility in a single package, significantly reducing the overhead required while providing greater flexibility and efficiency.
Cloud-Native Offerings
AWS Proton or proprietary portals from Azure/GCP
Good if you’re single-cloud or heavily invested in a particular ecosystem. Unfortunately, when you’re at the scale and complexity where an IDP is warranted, it’s more likely that you have to manage multiple clouds or hybrid infrastructure so the benefit you get here may be marginal.
Engineering Intelligence Tools
DX, Jellyfish, Pluralsight Flow
These tools touch some of the same use cases as those of platforms, and are often mentioned in the same conversations. But they are not the same as a developer platform. They focus more on developer productivity metrics (pull-request cadence, mean-time-to-recovery, etc.). They can complement an IDP but don’t provide the full provisioning or governance capabilities a platform needs.
5 Important Questions to Ask IDP Vendors
“Does it support my existing automation and IaC tools?”
If you’ve spent years building Terraform workflows, you probably don’t want to throw them out. Ensure the IDP can layer on top of your current investments without a complete rebuild.“Can it provide real self-service provisioning?”
A developer portal that only provides visibility might be enough at first, but soon you’ll want self-service. Confirm that your chosen solution can actually spin up resources, handle environment creation, or update code pipelines in a frictionless way.“How is ownership and dependency information maintained?”
Solving “who owns what” often requires continuous discovery or synchronization. Ask whether you’ll have to manually add and maintain YAML files for new services or if the platform can auto-discover and import them.“How long will it take to implement and see results?”
Some solutions (like open-source “do-it-yourself” portals) require extensive setup, plugin development, and manual ingestion of infrastructure code, leading to longer lead times. Others may streamline the process by quickly syncing with your existing Terraform projects or automatically discovering resources. Ask vendors about typical onboarding timelines, so you have a realistic estimate of when you’ll start seeing ROI.“How much maintenance overhead is on me?”
Find out whether you’ll need a dedicated platform team to maintain and update the system, or if the vendor provides ongoing support for patches, upgrades, and plugin development. Most systems will require some dedicated resources, but it can vary significantly from needing an entire team to build and maintain an open source product to part time coverage with a managed solution. Be realistic upfront about what your organization is able to invest on an ongoing basis.
Wrapping Up
An Internal Developer Platform can unify your organization’s tooling, free up ops teams, and give developers faster paths to deployment. Most companies adopt an IDP when the complexity reaches a tipping point—whether it’s a resource provisioning backlog, an overload of different CI/CD scripts, or a sudden mandate to cut costs and gain visibility. Understanding that journey is key: many teams arrive with a single problem (“I need to see everything in one place!”) but soon realize they also want self-service, governance, and broad technology support.
When evaluating IDPs:
Identify Your Main Triggers. These might be extended provisioning wait times, high ops ticket counts, or frequent “fire drills” where ownership of services is unclear.
Think Bigger Than Just a Portal. A catalog for visibility is a great start, but you’ll likely need a platform that also streamlines provisioning and imposes guardrails.
Build a Bridge to the Future. Unless you’re keen to re-architect everything, make sure the solution augments—rather than invalidates—your existing Terraform, Jenkins, or Kubernetes set-ups. At the same time, look for solutions that will enable you to standardize more and more of your infrastructure within the platform itself. A solution that simply provides visibility on top of a mess of YAML files is unlikely to help you evolve long term.
Map Short-Term Pain to Long-Term Vision. Even if you only solve “Who owns what?” today, you may soon need compliance automation, integrated cost tracking, and full developer self-service. Choose a solution that can expand to meet future needs.
Ultimately, an IDP is more than a tool. It’s a strategic investment in the way your organization builds and delivers software. By clarifying your requirements, focusing on essential features (and a vendor that supports them), and considering the full operational lifecycle, you’ll be well on your way to selecting an Internal Developer Platform that truly modernizes your development processes—and sets you up for sustainable growth.