With the growing complexity of the modern cloud and the increased fragmentation of developer teams, modern products sometimes feel like they’re built on a rats nest of conflicting frameworks and workflows that engineering teams struggle to keep organized. And no wonder: for a long time there was no specialized tool for taming the chaos. You either struggled mightily to keep everything organized and updated in a spreadsheet, or (more likely) you gave up entirely and just tried to keep your own small corner of it tidy. 

Then Backstage burst on the scene. Suddenly, an answer! Now you could centralize all the documentation, dashboards, and ownership details about everything your engineering org was doing, and track key metrics and data from across your stack in a really elegant and actionable way. It was legitimately a big moment. 

But as more teams began to adopt dev portals and get better visibility into their operations and tech stack, they discovered that this first generation of portals had limits. They were great at consolidating and presenting information, but they rarely guided behavior. So when it came time to address fragmentation and inefficiency that the portal revealed, they suddenly got a lot less helpful. Developers were still spinning up environments using a hodgepodge of custom scripts that were only rarely documented. CI/CD pipelines remained fragmented across teams. Security practices still differed wildly from one service to the next. 

Too often, the portal became a mirror, not a solution—one that just reflects organizational mess rather than helping to tidy it.

Why documentation alone doesn't work

Most developer portals on the market today focus on discoverability: where things live, who owns them, how to get started. And to be clear, that is very useful.They tell you everything. They even tell you when something's wrong so you can move to correct it. Yet once a developer moves from reading about the product and codebase to actually doing something with it, they exit the portal and reenter the world of the problems that the portal was supposed to fix.

Let’s say someone wants to deploy a new service. The portal might offer a helpful page listing naming conventions, a link to a sample pipeline, and some advice about tagging. But none of that prevents the engineer from copying an old repo, pushing a half-working config, and pinging DevOps in Slack when things break. The "source of truth" is easy to ignore when it doesn't plug into how work actually gets done.

This is the core limitation of most developer portals: they document the right way but don’t enforce it. They inform, but they don’t transform.

The shift from portals to platforms

To actually unify workflows, teams need more than static knowledge. They need a new kind of developer portal that combines the visibility and documentation of a traditional product with robust developer self-service that embeds best practices into the way everything is built and deployed. This isn’t just a portal but a developer platform—one that unifies the entire lifecycle from code to environment, with built-in visibility and automation.

Imagine spinning up a Go microservice with a single recipe. That recipe doesn’t just deploy code—it provisions a PagerDuty escalation policy, creates a Slack channel, registers a Jira component, assigns owners, sets up observability, and links everything in a clean, navigable interface. No extra YAML files. No manual updates. No loose ends. Everything just works.

That’s the promise of a real platform: self-service infrastructure that configures itself end-to-end, while automatically populating the metadata and relationships that portals traditionally rely on engineers to fill in. Ownership, dependencies, environments, SLAs—it’s all inferred directly from the act of self-provisioning. And because developers are building through the platform itself, it stays up to date. No rot. No drift. No backfill projects.

This isn’t hypothetical. Companies like Netflix and Google already operate this way. Their internal tools don’t just inform—they act. They turn best practices into defaults. They offer paved roads, not just maps. But building this kind of easy, accessible automation has been such a big project that it’s been out of reach for most companies. Until now. 

Meet Tempest: A modern portal that actually ships code

Tempest was built to make advanced developer platforms accessible for everyone. Unlike a conventional portal, it goes beyond scorecards and actually executes. It combines a clean UI with deep automation hooks, letting DevOps define what "good" looks like—and making that the easiest path for everyone to follow.

Spin up a containerized service? Tempest gives your devs the groundwork, just provide a name for the project. Need a new RDS instance with encryption and backup policies? Done in a few clicks. Want to deploy to Kubernetes using your team’s standard pipeline? Already integrated.

No more hunting through repos for Terraform files. No more copying-and-pasting shell scripts. No more one-off Slack messages asking how someone got their build to pass. Just consistent, secure, reliable outcomes every time.

How Tempest solves the real problems

1. Fewer Workarounds, More Guardrails

Most teams try to enforce best practices with linter rules, CI/CD templates, and lots of documentation. But when those tools get in the way, developers find workarounds. This leads to shadow infrastructure, sprawling permissions, and security holes.

Tempest fixes this by making best practices invisible. Role-scoped credentials, encryption, tagging, and compliance checks happen behind the scenes, embedded in the workflows developers already use. No friction, no temptation to cut corners.

2. Visibility Without Complexity

When something breaks in the cloud, it’s often hard to tell what changed, who changed it, or how to roll it back. Tempest addresses this with full audit trails, per-resource ownership tagging, and transparent logs. Every environment is traceable. Every deployment is attributable. That makes debugging and compliance much faster—and less stressful.

3. Infrastructure as Code, But Better

If your team already uses Terraform, Helm, or YAML-based IaC, Tempest doesn’t need to replace them entirely. Instead, it can wrap those automations so they can be deployed through a user-friendly interface. You can turn your existing configurations into private apps inside Tempest. Those apps become drag-and-drop components that any team can use safely, without needing to understand every variable or flag. It’s a way to scale IaC without overwhelming developers.

4. A User Experience Developers Don’t Hate

One of the biggest reasons platforms fail is poor UX. Tempest changes that. Its interface is clean, responsive, and purpose-built for developers under pressure. It only asks for what it needs. It surfaces the right defaults. And it gets out of your way when you want to move fast.

This matters more than people think. If the UI slows you down, developers revert to old habits. If it helps you move faster, it becomes indispensable.

Summing it up: Tempest is a better way to build and ship

Tempest isn’t just a tool. It’s a way of thinking about internal operations: one where the "right way" to do things isn’t locked in a wiki, but baked into every workflow. That’s the future of developer productivity. Not more mess of dashboards. Not more out of date docs. Just fast, consistent, reliable delivery.

If your team is tired of chasing best practices that never seem to stick—or if your DevOps team is buried in one-off requests and Slack messages—it’s time for something better.

Give Tempest a try. Turn your internal documentation into real automation. And finally build the developer platform your team actually wants to use.