Chapter 2 Is Hot Off The Press
This chapter on Internal Developer Platform will set the foundations of what's to come in the following chapters
It’s been a few weeks working on the second chapter of the book. In my previous newsletter, I discussed how this chapter was repurposed from Platform as a Product to an Internal Developer Platform. Now that it’s finished, I wanted to share some insights about the chapter and what you can expect from it.
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a curated set of tools, services, and processes that enable development teams to build, deploy, and manage applications efficiently. More precisely, it integrates an organization's technologies into golden paths that reduce cognitive load and enable self-service. This is not a concept I coined for this book. That’s what people in the industry have been calling it for a few years now. And I think the name captures well the essence of what we are trying to achieve.
You might wonder how an IDP differs from a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering such as Heroku or Render. The distinction is customization and control. A commercial PaaS is a one-size-fits-all solution —you adapt to it. An IDP is tailored to your organization’s specific needs, technologies, and constraints. You build it, you own it, you evolve it based on feedback from your developers.
In this chapter, I outline my view of an IDP we will build throughout the book and explore the product mindset required to succeed in this journey. Building a platform is not just a technical challenge. It’s a cultural and organizational one. The mindset shift is crucial: the platform team doesn’t provide servers, it enables paths for development teams to do it themselves. The easy path has to be the right path.
I also outline some friction points I have encountered in my experience building platforms. If you don’t build the right thing at the right time, the platform will unavoidably fail. The developers won’t use it, and all your effort will be wasted.
I am pleased with the result of this chapter. It sets the foundation for everything that follows. The remaining chapters will dive into implementation: segmentation, infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, security, and developer experience. Each one builds on the product mindset established here.
That’s all for now.
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