Developer experience platforms bring everything developers need to build and run software together in one place. They bring standardization to the way developers work, ensuring consistency across a large organization, but also help developers to be more effective. They remove the cognitive and practical overheads of taking care of infrastructure and tooling.
They’re sometimes talked about in the same breath as developer portals — however, where developer experience platforms provide tooling and infrastructure resources, developer portals are more like catalogs or hubs where developers can discover services or documentation to help them do their job.
When used effectively, they can increase developer productivity and ensure security and reliability. Development teams can thus deliver value at an even faster pace.
A standardized suite of tools, APIs, configurations and documentation that allow developers to ship code quickly and effectively.
Developer Experience Platforms help developers focus on what they’re good at. That’s good news for business and good for talent acquisition and retention.
A developer experience platform requires a committed platform team that can drive adoption and maintain and evolve it.
They are helping large organizations empower development teams to focus on building new features and products rather than the underlying software system.
What are developer experience platforms?
A developer experience platform is a suite of tools and guardrails that make it easy for developers to focus on building and shipping products and features. One way to think about it is through a construction metaphor: a building can be extended and changed without the construction team having to worry about things like electricity and water — that’s all taken care of.
Because large, modern software systems — built using a microservices architecture — can be complex, a developer experience platform can make developers lives easier by making tools, services and configurations accessible and available.
It’s sometimes called an ‘internal developer platform’, but should be distinguished from a developer portal.
What’s in it for you?
By making it easy for developers to build and ship new products and features, you help improve their productivity and the overall experience. In other words, rather than spending time worrying about the underlying infrastructure and configurations to make something work, they can focus purely on building it.
There are multiple benefits: for instance, it means the business decreases the time to market of financially beneficial features and improvements. It also reduces the number of repetitive tasks developers need to do, making them more productive and happier. This is important when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.
What are the trade-offs of developer experience platforms?
A developer experience platform can be powerful but it requires support and commitment to be effective. It is not sufficient to just purchase an off-the-shelf product and provide licenses to the organization. A platform team is essential — they should be responsible for building, maintaining, and evangelizing for the platform; this means you need to invest in a team that can purely focus on the platform. This doesn’t need to be a huge, completely new team; it could be achieved by deploying a small number (say two to three) of engineers with infrastructure and DevOps experience and skills.
It’s also a long-term play: it won’t deliver results immediately. However with patience, commitment and the right metrics in place it will help turn a technically competent organization into a high performance one.
How are developer experience platforms being used?
The most notable example of a developer experience platform is Spotify’s Backstage. Initially designed to support the streaming platform’s diverse teams — and reinforce their autonomy — it was open sourced in March 2020, making it available to other organizations to use and adapt to their own contexts.
In the last few years, companies such as Netflix, American Airlines, Peloton and Wayfair have adopted it. It’s helping all of these organizations bring unity and consistency into the way their development teams build software and, in doing so, strengthening their proposition to potential employees that want to work on exciting and ambitious projects.
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