What is internal developer platform

An internal developer platform is a set of tools, frameworks, and services that enable developers to build, test, deploy, and monitor software applications within an organization more efficiently and effectively. It provides developers with a stable and consistent environment for building and deploying software, reducing the time and effort required to launch new applications and services.

Benefits of an Internal Developer Platform

An internal developer platform is a powerful tool that can help organizations streamline their software development processes and achieve better business outcomes. By providing developers with a centralized platform for building, testing, and deploying applications, an internal developer platform can offer a range of benefits, including:

• Increased developer productivity: With an internal developer platform, developers can focus on building and testing applications, rather than managing infrastructure. This can help to reduce the time and effort required to develop new applications, while also improving the quality and reliability of the software being produced.
• Reduced time-to-market: By enabling faster application development, testing, and deployment, an internal developer platform can help organizations to bring new features and products to market more quickly. This can be a key competitive advantage, as companies that are able to innovate faster are often better able to capture market share and grow their businesses.
• Greater agility: An internal developer platform can also help organizations to be more agile and responsive to changing market conditions. By providing developers with easy access to new technologies and tools, the platform can enable rapid experimentation and iteration, leading to more innovative products and services.
• Better collaboration: The platform can facilitate collaboration among developers, operations teams, and other stakeholders, helping to promote better communication and teamwork. This can be especially important in larger organizations, where different teams may be working on different parts of a project or application.
• Improved quality: An internal developer platform can help to improve the quality of the software being produced by enabling developers to test applications in a consistent and repeatable manner. This can help to reduce the number of bugs and defects in production, leading to a better user experience and fewer support tickets.

In summary, an internal developer platform can be a powerful tool for organizations looking to streamline their software development processes, increase agility, and achieve better business outcomes. By providing developers with a centralized platform for building, testing, and deploying applications, companies can improve productivity, reduce time-to-market, encourage innovation, promote collaboration, and improve the quality of the software they produce.

Where most Internal Developer Platforms Fail

The biggest miss of Internal Developer Platforms is their lack of intrinsic value that organizational users receive by adopting them.  At the core, the concept of an IDP is correct, however in practice it takes significant time and effort to properly implement and maintain and IDP for it to show a positive ROI.    

If the goal of an IDP is to improve the developer experience (and velocity) by instilling a culture of devops self-service then unfortunately the approach is fatally flawed.  Lets face it, no self service platform can be successful if it forgets who its suppose to Serve- the end users.  In an article in Forbes, Kubiya CEO Amit catalogs the flaws of the traditional IDP approach, and how at its core, the indoctrination of Large Language Models into the technology stack has completely changed the rules of the game. As the battle to become a system of record is riddled with roadblocks, more and more organizations are discovering that the new user interface of choice is not a new system at all, but actually Chat.  Yes folks, Language is the new User Interface. 

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Introducing Kubiya

Kubiya is a self-serve conversational and generative AI based platform. Powered by Large Language Models, it makes complex devops processes easily accessible to end-users. 

Some of the key aspects that makes Kubiya powerful:

• It lives where your users are - Kubiya is an assistant inside your chat platform such as Slack. End-users just tag Kubiya as they would tag any other team member. No context switching. No learning curve. No bookmarks.
• It’s simple and easy to use. Just converse with Kubiya. No need to navigate between menu items or figure out which API to use.

• Highly secure

• Local runners - To keep your network secure Kubiya connects to internal platforms through a lightweight operator that establishes a one-way secure tunnel to your dedicated namespace in Kubiya.
• Audit trail - Kubiya keeps an audit trail of everything done in the system including approval requests and can push those to any 3rd party logging tool.
• Role Based Access Control (RBAC) - Kubiya lets you define policies and assign them to groups or users. 
• Just-In-Time (JIT) - users can request temporary permissions and operators can give temporary access to resources with Kubiya managing TTL. Read more about security.

• Full spectrum of integrations and ability to integrate with your homegrown systems through action stores.
• Smart and adaptive - Kubiya learns from the behavior of your users and changes its response to the specific user based on history. 
• Analytics - Kubiya supports open telemetry so you can connect it to tools such as Grafana to gain insight on what your users are doing of which docs are out-of-date.
• Create custom workflows using generative AI - Want to template the experience to your end-users and ask inputs in a way your users understand? Using generative AI you can describe a workflow and Kubiya will generate that, giving you steps such as conditions, notifications, parsing to tailor and test your workflows.

• Integration with knowledge systems - Kubiya doesn’t only assist with actions related to your engineering platforms but also makes your docs accessible to end users by answering questions based on your documentation.
• Async execution

Ready to see Kubiya in action - Use our playground or signup to a private instance.