Building an Internal Developer Platform from Scratch

A step-by-step checklist for designing and building an internal developer platform (IDP) that gives your engineers self-service access to infrastructure, environments, and deployments without filing tickets.

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Platform EngineeringAdvanced

platform-engineeringdeveloper-experienceidpself-servicebackstage

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Map your developers' biggest time sinks

Critical

Define your platform's API contract

Critical

Set up a service catalog with Backstage

Critical

Build golden path templates for new services

Critical

Wire up self-service infrastructure provisioning

Critical

Automate ephemeral environment creation

Build a portal UI that surfaces everything in one place

Set up RBAC and team ownership boundaries

Critical

Create shared CI/CD pipeline templates

Integrate secrets management into the platform

Critical

Set SLOs for the platform itself

Generate docs from code and serve them in the portal

Add per-team cost visibility

Track adoption and measure developer satisfaction

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