One IDP piece at a time

by Jay Cuthrell
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Music: Johnny Cash - One Piece at a Time (1976)

This week we take a look at recent Internal Developer Platform (IDP) coverage, taxonomy, and industry trends.

Getting Informed

As a background, IDP is a topic covered by this newsletter in recent issues this year.

If trends are fun. Google Trends can be fun, visually.

If you look at just platform engineering for the past 10 years… Impressive!

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 6.57.00 PM.png

If you begin zooming in for the past year with other portmanteau somethingOps buzzwords… Still impressive!

Screenshot 2023-05-06 at 6.58.47 PM.png

If you compare against internal developer platform… A hint of green appears!

Screenshot 2023-05-07 at 10.27.36 AM.png

If you add in that old chestnut of DevOps… Sobering purple bromide reality!

Screenshot 2023-05-07 at 10.33.35 AM.png

Now, up to now my plan went all right 🎶

As you might expect, the market is producing listicles that markets seeking maturity are known for. So, let’s take a look at a recent listicle sample about IDP that seek to establish the enumeration of IDP qualities and considerations counting up from the number four (4!) and ending with the number eight (8!).

Indeed, I can think of someone that is very excited for this issue of Fudge Sunday… and all fingers for counting will be exhausted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count\_von\_Count

Four (4!)

In 2021, OpenCredo CEO/CTO Nicki Watt captured the four (4) characteristics of a successful platform experience. You can watch Nicki’s live presentation and review the slides.

Five (5!)

For perspective, the internaldeveloperplatform.org GitHub public-site repository went live in 2021. As a recap, the site published the five (5!) core components of an IDP.

Six (6!)

Last month, Humanitec Tech Evangelizer Fernando Villalba captured six (6!) steps to design an IDP. In fact, you can watch the presentation on YouTube.

Seven (7!)

This month, Mia-Platform Developer Advocate Michel Murabito made the case for seven (7!) core components. You can read this post on the CNCF.io guest blog or on the original site.

Eight (8!)

At this point you might be asking if this progression keeps going or someone taps the literary brakes. Well, then Shipa Field CTO and current Harness Product Manager Ravi Lachhman has you covered with the eight (8!) fallacies of an IDP. You can read the post at SDTimes

'Til we tried to put it all together one night 🎶

Stepping back from numerical listicle progressions, there are clearly tools involved in any IDP. However, it is important to remember that even common hand tools have characteristics too — or parts — and one example is the common hand file.

https://www.wonkeedonkeetools.co.uk/files/what-are-the-basic-parts-of-a-file

Simply grabbing a common hand file by itself to begin use is not ideal experience[1] due to the short pointy tang and angular heel. Instead, a handle added to the common hand file is a far more pleasant experience.

There are already articles from IDP as a Service (IDPaaS) companies — like Argonaut — where Product Marketing Manager Guhan Sundar explains how one could create an IDP. One. Piece. At. A Time. Of course, this will beg the question — Is manually creating an IDP core to the business or a sensible use of precious time and capital?

Lastly, if you aren’t neccesarily multicloud and purely consuming a single cloud like AWS, an AWS-centric view of making serverless and IDP happen is available from Momento Ecosystem Enginer Allen Helton along with StackTape CEO Matúš Čongrády and Head of Developer Relations Taylor Deakyne as a fireside chat on YouTube.

So, what will be the next big thing in Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and IDP as a Service (IDPaaS)?

Until then… Place your bets!

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.

🤓

  1. Yes, a farmer’s file by itself is arguably more comfortable than a common file by itself — but farmer’s files are not as common and mostly associated with agricultural use cases and you’ll want to wear gloves unless you have, well, a farmer’s hard callused hands. And even then, you’ll probably want to pay for sharpening as a service for the best results. YMMV. ↩︎

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