Why an Internal Developer Platform

Jason Warner, CTO at GitHub sharing his insights on why they built an Internal Developer Platform at GitHub.

0:00 Why we built an IDP
2:11 Bash scripts
3:55 Velocity with an IDP
6:15 How we built an IDP
8:31 The components of GitHub IDP
9:33 Who moved my cheese?
11:47 Communication between Ops and Devs
13:16 Who should build an IDP?
15:05 Engineering Ops and IDPs

[kdietz]

What I have in mind is something more focused on the developer who is trying to write code in the heat of battle. I dream of a platform where I have all the documentation I need at my finger tips, all the code from around the organization is there too, I can search for documentation and code, I can bookmark things, take notes, annotate/tag files, arrange it all to my liking, then I can do interactive things like all the stuff on beautifytools in an interactive notebook, I can have something like Postman in there for fiddling with REST APIs. All of these kinds of things I need as a developer are all collected up into a portal within an interactive notebook metaphor. Something like Jupyter Notebooks for developers is what I"m thinking of.

[kdietz]

The IDP problem space is so huge, no single company could ever build a generalized product, could they? You have to narrow the scope down to something that has reasonable boundaries. Something like Backstage seems at least reasonable. Catalogs, templates, documentation, plugins to integrate with other systems. But Backstage is still just a framework, not an off-the-shelf product per se.