For platform engineering teams, the big question is: build or buy?
Help developers do more Has become an organizational priority in less time. As the scope of SaaS grows and DevOps grows in popularity, companies are finding they need to ease the cognitive burden on developers, who often have to understand all the microservices available.
While this problem was originally solved with a service catalog, the category has evolved into something more ambitious: a one-stop shop that gives developers access to all the microservices and tools in their ecosystem.
This category, known as internal developer portals, is quickly gaining traction among software-intensive companies as they seek to improve the developer experience and thus increase efficiency.according to forrest87% of DevOps leaders agree that improving developer productivity is a top priority for the next 12 months.
Every Knuth“These portals enable software engineering leaders to create a versatile ‘app store’ that increases software reuse, improves the developer onboarding experience, streamlines software delivery and facilitates knowledge sharing.”
But these developer portals didn’t emerge on their own. Their emergence is closely related to another trend: the emergence of platform engineering.
Shomik Ghosh, partner at Boldstart Ventures, told TechCrunch+ that, in short, platform engineering teams are “teams, typically in larger organizations, whose role is to improve the developer experience for other developers in the organization.”
Platform engineering teams are becoming more common in large organizations, as are internal developer portals.Knuth expect By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have a platform team, and by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will have self-service developer portals for their engineers.
To better understand why and how internal developer portals came about, let’s step back a bit.
beyond the catalog
Internal developer portals are a key tool for platform engineering teams, but they actually existed before either concept was fully conceived. In fact, they came after DevOps: Engineers suddenly found themselves increasingly tasked with deploying and operating the code they wrote. But in reality—and in production—it’s often unclear who owns a given microservice.
