Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

Nice post, In your opinion, is there a stage which is too late to adopt an IDP? Practically speaking, transitioning from an in-house system to IDP requires a significant overhead and a danger of lockin with the vendor. What considerations would you suggest here?

Yes - there's certainly a point where each team has become very tied to their own solution. If you went past the 5 teams point (where you can still all get in a room/virtual space and talk) and let each team deal with the pain, it will be harder to get strong adoption of the platform (the old Not Made Here problem).

I think "harder" is probably most manifest in the culture side of things. The tech is less hard than getting the people along.