The problem with 'you build it, you run it'
DevOps asked every team to own infrastructure. The result: every team reinvented CI/CD, secrets, and observability — slowly, inconsistently, and expensively.
What an internal developer platform is
A platform is a set of golden paths: opinionated, supported templates for the most common workloads. Developers self-serve, the platform team maintains the paved road.
The golden paths
- Stateless web service with autoscaling
- Scheduled data pipeline
- Event-driven function
- Machine learning inference endpoint
Each path bundles provisioning, CI/CD, secrets, observability, and on-call.
Treat the platform as a product
The platform team has customers (developers), a backlog, and SLAs. If adoption is voluntary, quality follows. Force adoption and you get shadow IT instead.