What is Internal Developer Platform(IDP)?

• In simple words, it abstracts away the complexity of underlying infrastructure for the developers using self-service tools and technologies

• Helps developers to focus on building the application by providing "Golden paths" to handle deployments/infrastructure provision or management through a portal

Why we need it or what it does?

• Reduces the cognitive load: Abstracting away the underlying complexity like provisioning cloud resources, environments & CI/CD setup

• Increases productivity: By leveraging IDP, developers can focus on building the application instead doing the operational tasks

• Unified Experience: Central portal for software catalogs, documentation and accessing tools

How it is related to Platform Engineering

• Core output of Platform Engineering, created to serve developers as customers of the IDP platform

• Platform Engineering team responsible for designing & maintaining the IDP

• Platform team continuously improve the IDP, based on the developer feedback

Summary:

Internal – IDPs are meant for internal use only.
Developer – Indicates the internal customer and the primary user, the application developer.
Platform – Characterizes the product type.