Dos and don’ts of building Internal Developer Platforms for enterprises

Software delivery at enterprises can be challenging. As a senior leader or engineer at a large enterprise, it can be difficult to see how the things you’ve been reading online about platform engineering or internal developer platforms could work in your complex environment. This talk is our ‘lessons learned’ from building internal developer platforms for a number of enterprises to help you get off on the right foot (or, at least avoid the wrong foot).

Enterprise software delivery can be…painful! Teams are rarely self-sufficient, requiring a seemingly never ending sequence of tickets and requests to get things done. Standards are often lacking or difficult to find leading to precious time wasted reinventing the wheel. And compliance and governance - whilst essential - are often applied in a heavy handed manner, slowing the pace of software delivery and other technology change to a crawl.

In this session, we’ll cover some of the lessons learned from working with a number of our enterprise clients to address the above challenges (and more) with Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and platform engineering practices. This talk will have some technical learnings (for the engineers amongst us) and some cultural, organizational and product considerations for senior leaders and product managers. Through sharing our experiences we hope you will gain an understanding of what to do (or not to do) when building your own enterprise scale IDP.