Developer experience is one of the trendiest buzzwords in today’s tech landscape, but what does it actually mean? More importantly, how did we get here? It didn’t happen overnight; it was a series of developments and growing complexities that led us to this point. Let’s break it down.
It started with four key factors driving the shift. First, we moved from managing a single monolithic application to handling “one thing to many things.” Suddenly, we were dealing with microservices, containerized environments, and a multitude of cloud services. These services, often small in scope but vast in number, added significant complexity to our tech stacks.
Microservices need to build, ship, and communicate with each other, which drastically changed the developer’s scope and journey as they adapted to and migrated towards the containerized and cloud world. Platform approaches began to emerge, with the goal of simplifying the developer’s journey for continuous delivery—allowing them to focus on writing code without worrying about the platform infrastructure.
This shift asked developers to not just write code but also to build and ship it, adding bit of complexity to their roles as they adopted the DevOps methodology. As these complexities increased, it became clear that we needed solutions to ease the burden on developers.
As we struggled to manage these services manually, we brought in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), then container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, and soon after, service meshes like Istio to handle inter-service communication. Add gateways, monitoring systems, and numerous “tiny miny” cloud services to the mix, and before long, we were buried in an ocean of tools. The intention was to streamline development and deployment processes, but the irony is that with each new tool, we added another layer of complexity for developers to manage.
This is when Low-Code/No-Code platforms entered the scene, promising to simplify the landscape for non-developers, and for a while, it was trending. But soon, organizations realized that these platforms only solved a piece of the puzzle. As the complexities of cloud-native applications continued to grow, Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) emerged as a way to streamline the developer experience (DX). The idea was to create a one-stop shop for developers, providing all the tools they needed while abstracting away much of the complexity.
But here’s the kicker: Are we actually building platforms, or are we just aggregating tools under one roof and calling it a platform? With the rise of GenAI-based code generation and AI/ML-driven automation, we’ve introduced even more layers. These tools claim to make developers’ lives easier, but are they just hiding complexity under the hood rather than solving it?
Many organizations have an Internal Developer Portal in place, but only a few truly understand how to build it in a way that qualifies as a true platform. If an IDP doesn’t make developers’ lives easier and empower them to create and deploy faster with minimal friction, it’s not a platform—it’s just an aggregation of tools designed to make the complexity less visible.
Next time you look at an IDP, scratch beneath the surface. Is it truly a platform that simplifies workflows, or is it just masking the chaos with a friendly interface? Let’s build platforms on strong foundations, not just catchy names or trending waves. Stay tuned for a series of blogs where we’ll break down this complex topic into practical, meaningful insights. Don’t miss out—join us on this journey to mastering platform development! Enroll at the top of the page and “Be a Panda!” to know about the next blog in the series and weekly newsletter.
PS: Thanks to Tigin Kaptanoglu for sharing this funny IDP acronym during our chat at the Amsterdam Book Launch. It really helps separate the wheat from the chaff!
– Blog Authors: Chandra Sharma & Shweta Vohra
