What are Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platform?

Question

Accepted Answer

**Platform Engineering** — creating internal platforms for developers so they do not handle infrastructure manually.

**Simple analogy:** IDP (Internal Developer Platform) — like McDonalds for developers: they order an "API service with PostgreSQL", and the platform automatically creates everything needed.

**IDP Components:**
1. **Self-service portal** — UI for creating services.
2. **CI/CD** — automatic pipelines.
3. **IaC** — Terraform/Pulumi modules.
4. **Observability** — metrics, logs, alerts.
5. **Service Catalog** — service catalog.

**Backstage (Spotify) — framework for IDP:**
```yaml
# catalog-info.yaml
apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: my-api
  description: REST API for orders
  annotations:
    github.com/project-slug: myorg/my-api
  tags:
    - nodejs
    - api
  links:
    - url: https://grafana.mycompany.com/d/myapi
      title: Grafana Dashboard
spec:
  type: service
  lifecycle: production
  owner: team-orders
  system: orders-system
  providesApis:
    - orders-api
  dependsOn:
    - resource:orders-db
    - resource:orders-redis
```

**Backstage Plugins:** Kubernetes, TechDocs, Scaffolder (create new service), CI/CD, Cost Insights.

**Result:** Developer creates a service in 5 minutes instead of 2 days.

DevOps: What are Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platform?