In 2024, the IDP landscape has significantly matured, and its acceptance by many industries has grown. DevPortal’s survey shows that around 85% of companies from the survey have already adopted an internal developer portal or are planning to do so in the next year. This goes very well with the growing appreciation of the efficiency these platforms bring to the development process of any organization. Moreover, the software landscape will typically reach a staggering size, given its strong integration with AI and advanced technologies as a reflection of the technology-as-core nature of current business strategies. This also shows a noticeable trend towards platforms enabling easier integration with pre-existing systems and automating pivotal development workflows. This shows the direction of the industry in terms of needing a more agile and adaptive technological environment.
In this blog post, we will focus on key trends reshaping the landscape of internal developer platforms.
Importance of internal developer platform
IDPs are important because they streamline the process and make software development effective within an organization. Put differently, through a standardized suite of development tools and services, IDPs make producing software further effective. IDPs reduce the cognitive load on the developers by automating repetitive tasks and infrastructure management, which will afford the developers more time to spend on innovative coding to add value. Moreover, IDPs make collaboration between various teams extra effective, thus reducing errors and increasing speed in development activities, which eventually increases the frequency of product iteration and time to market. Bringing a coherent whole of tools and services together greatly enhances productivity and races the delivery of business value.
Increasing adoption of self-service capabilities within IDP
The trend toward self-service in developer platforms improves and quickens collaboration between developers and the operations team. Leading the charge are OpsLevel and Humanitec, among others, that empower developers to manage services, dependencies, and infrastructure in a fully autonomous way through a single platform. Such empowering of the developers reduces intervention drastically at each step of the operations cycle, thereby taking the brakes off development cycles and potential productivity. Such features ensure developers can readily adapt to changing project needs and help establish a more agile and interactive atmosphere. This speeds up deliveries and inculcates deep integration understandings among teams, thus optimizing the whole development.
Focus on streamlined processes and robust monitoring capabilities
The latest shift observed within internal developer platforms is critical: ensuring a better developer experience through process simplification and monitoring. The platforms—Mia Platform and Portainer— have strong analytics with deep insights into the performance of systems and behavior of applications. This advanced analytics helps teams make informed choices in real time, therefore, making services more efficient, and reliable. All these features greatly enhance productivity and system stability due to workflow simplification and proactive issue resolution with monitoring. All these improvements speed up the development cycle and lead to the overall quality of the software.
Seamless integration with existing tools and technologies
The integration capabilities of internal developer platforms are expanding in a way that improves the efficiency of software development workflows by great strides. Argonaut, Nullstone, and their ilk of new toolsets have been leading the way toward advanced features that simplify the management of microservice architectures and automate deployment processes. Strong support for easier integration with current tools and technologies to realize CI/CD pipelines decreases the technical overhead on the developer, who will then be left with more time for innovation and less time for infrastructure management. This will, in turn, increase the development cycle time and overall productivity.
Built-in features to handle security measures
Security and compliance remain at the forefront of developing and deploying internal developer platforms. Advanced digital security threats concerning conformities make organizations seek development platforms with built-in security features for safe and compliant software development cycles. This is a must aspect of IDPs with built-in security and compliance features to ensure trust and reliability in avoiding data breaches and meeting regulatory requirements. Due to assured secure development environments, organizations want IDPs with built-in security and compliance features. They should support the technical development and all other aspects to align with the highest level of security and regulatory compliance.
Controlled freedom within platform engineering
Platform engineering with a human touch: a setup that ensures developers receive enough structured guidance to execute their tasks efficiently, with enough freedom to innovate and customize the solutions—a model that gains momentum. This allows the developer the tools and frameworks to do their job while still being able to innovate and develop tailor-made solutions. Mercado Libre’s platform engineering strategy is no different, supported by the automation of tedious, repetitive tasks that raise the bar on efficiency and give stakeholders immediate benefits in the platform. The approach easily obtains the buy-in of developers and steers the adoption of a tool that helps them get the job done without imposing restrictions on their work. This model optimizes developer satisfaction and productivity by facilitating innovation in a guided manner.
The future of Internal Developer Platforms
The next generation of IDPs will change radically: more automation and integration, focused on user-centered design. Automation will likely progress with AI and machine learning at the core for streamlining software development processes and predictive operation management. The integration will be much stronger, and the platforms will offer improved seamless interactions among heterogeneous tools and ecosystems with all the more agility when practicing DevOps. In addition, better developer experience will tune the platforms more intuitively and responsively to the developers’ needs—in other words, more personalized and context-aware tools.