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Platform Engineering 2025: Building Internal Developer Platforms

Oct 26, 2025•
platform-engineeringidpdevexgolden-paths
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Platform engineering turns infrastructure into a product. This guide explains how to create an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that speeds delivery without sacrificing control.

Executive summary

  • Treat platform as a product; measure adoption and cycle time
  • Provide self-service templates with sensible defaults; enforce via policies
  • Offer golden paths; document trade-offs; support feedback loops

IDP reference architecture

  • Portal (Backstage): catalog, templates, scorecards
  • CI/CD: standardized pipelines; security gates
  • Runtime: K8s + GitOps; service mesh; observability baked in

Golden paths

  • Service template: repo + CI + infra + runtime + SLOs
  • Non‑functional defaults: auth, logs, metrics, tracing, alerts

Governance

  • Policies in code; drift detection; scorecards for SLOs and maturity

Metrics

  • Lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, adoption, satisfaction

FAQ

Q: Backstage mandatory?
A: No, but a portal is critical—Backstage is a strong default with a rich plugin ecosystem.

  • GitOps Strategies: /blog/gitops-argocd-flux-kubernetes-deployment-strategies
  • OpenTelemetry Guide: /blog/observability-opentelemetry-complete-implementation-guide
  • Kubernetes Cost Optimization: /blog/kubernetes-cost-optimization-finops-strategies-2025
  • Terraform Best Practices: /blog/terraform-best-practices-infrastructure-as-code-2025
  • AWS Architecture Patterns: /blog/aws-architecture-patterns-well-architected-framework

Call to action

Building an IDP? Get a free platform maturity assessment.
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