hi team, I work for a corporation with 3.5K engineers, and many pieces of IDP are already implemented. Reading IDP principles, planes and reference architectures I can't fit a set of components that help developers bootstrap new products to maximize compliance with various corporation requirements and maximize stickiness to golden paths - this includes spring boot starters that help to integrate with internal IDP mechanisms, provide guardrails for API design, reference implementation of IaC, CI and others. They fit well with the developer control plane, right? Still, there are categories of components within the plane like IDE, service catalogue, version control etc and none of those proposed looks like a good match for the mentioned components with bootstrapping and compliance capabilities. Any ideas?

I’m not 100% sure I’m clear on what the question is… could you rephrase somehow?

where in platform engineering architecture would you place tools that help developers bootstrap new applications - like app skeleton with initial configuration or even some of corporation policies implemented out of the box like audit logging?

Are you asking where or do you mean to ask “how” would you implement the capabilities you describe?

The term you’re looking for is “scaffolding”. Most portals come with scaffolding capabilities, as this is where you would expect it to sit - in the developer control plane and right beside the catalog, where the result should normally be logged. If you do not have the need for a catalog, then there might be other systems where scaffolding capabilities can also be integrated seamlessly. Most Git providers also offer some sort of templating. There are frameworks like cookiecutter that implement a scaffolding workflow. The possibilities are all there - the question is: what is the problem that needs to be solved?

Right scaffoldings, I forgot about this term since it's not used for this solution. Problem: I tried to understand where scaffoldings fit into the architecture of IDP. We use Yeoman for custom scaffolding, so @Clemens Jütte if I understood you correctly, this should be part of the service catalogue within the developer plane?

If you take a look at service catalog implementations aka portals, e.g. backstage, cortex, port, etc. - they all come with scaffolding capabilities. The problem I see is: You’re asking us to put a concept in a box for you. But without understanding of the underlying problem it’s very hard to give you a real recommendation - or even really fitting explanation. The “concept” car will fit nicely into the “vehicles” box. So does a boat or an airplane. Until I know if you want to drive, swim or fly, I might give you a very wrong idea or recommendation @Grzegorz Wojciechowski

I was looking for software templates like described in Backstage to build a template that should be used by any service build in the corporation. The templates are service catalog items so I think I get what I was looking for.

You might want to check out https://www.monokle.io This is a set of tools that helps provide guardrails through configuration policies. All tools have an IDE functionality and provides context around config errors and how to fix them but there is also a VS Code extension that allows Devs to have real-time visibility of validation and policy erros and in turn validate resources within their own IDE.