Internal Developer Portals: Use Cases and Key Components

Are you interested in learning a bit more about Developer Portals? I had a great discussion with my friends over at DX (getdx.com) around the use cases and key components of a good portal.

Here are some of the questions we tackled.

1. Why has this become an area of interest in the past 2-3 years?

2. Besides Spotify Backstage, what are other notable examples of homegrown versions of this type of thing? (e.g. what does Google/Netflix/etc do)

3. What _is_ an internal developer portal? Describe it to me like I’m a non-technical CFO. Then describe it to me like I’m an engineer.

4. Internal developer portal vs internal developer platform: are these the same thing or different? (my view is that the latter is more specific to app deployment ala heroku)

5. Internal developer portal vs service catalog: are these the same thing or different? (in my eyes they are - per our convo)

6. What are simple solutions to some of the problems that IDPs solve (e.g., a spreadsheet that lists services - have you seen this work)?

7. What are the biggest misconceptions or mistakes you see in companies that are thinking about developer portals?

8. We’ll talk more about different build and buy options on the market and paths in our next session, but what are the most common traps in terms of where/why these projects fail or fall short?

What did we miss? Have any other questions around dev portals? We will be digging into this more and on our Youtube channel so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of it!