Extending the Internal Developer Platform reference architecture

Internal Developer Platform (IDP) reference architectures are exemplary but missing one part: their inner capabilities. It might be too Kubernetes-opinionated, but a platform is more than developer portals, CICD, and infrastructure.

The missing piece of IDP architecture in the current reference architecture doesn't properly consider the layer within the platform itself. The goal of an IDP is not just to provide the infrastructure, but to provide a holistic product solving the end users' problems. We have to bake into platform capabilities to help apps scale, lifting difficult workloads such as ML and providing integrations for security and identity.