Most companies don’t aspire to build perfect DevOps or cloud engineering teams. They just want the problems solved, quickly, safely, and without hiring dozens of specialists.
That’s where Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) come in: a productized way to give developers self-service deployments, secure environments, and golden paths to production without reinventing the wheel.
But IDPs aren’t for everyone.
If you’re Netflix, Shopify, or Airbnb, companies where platform engineering is a strategic differentiator, you should architect and manage your own stack. But if you’re a growing SaaS, a retailer modernizing online experiences, or a financial institution moving to the cloud, platform engineering isn’t your business. Shipping features is.
IDPs offer:
Self-service deploys without infrastructure headaches
FinOps embedded into the engineering process
Built-in security and compliance
Standardized environments across dev, staging, and prod
Integrated observability and operations
You still own your code, your cloud, and your destiny, but you don’t have to build and maintain a platform from scratch.
The core decision is simple: Do you want to build a cloud platform company? Or do you want to build your company?
For most, the answer is clear and the future is buying platforms, not building them.
Stop plumbing, start creating.