Question to those who are building/adopting IDPs. What are the organisational pre-requisites? What are the skills, cultural behaviours and tech that both your users and those building the IDP need to have? Are you expecting the IDP to fill these gaps? Or do you have other programs to address the gaps whilst building the IDP? For example, does your org understand what CI is? and culturally understand the value of building in small increments? Do devs know how to use Git well?

You'll find a lot of different scenarios.... IMHO: even with the right tech skills, is up to the middle management the success of implementing an IDP.

we're asking mostly the same questions of ourselves at the moment. we're trying to modernise a legacy application with some key skills missing across the engineering teams (IaC, K8s, observability etc.), so the short-term aim is to try to lower the bar of entry to the cloud and create some patterns while we upskill. organisationally we have some work to do to change the view that "you build it you run it" doesn't mean you don't need a good PE capability

"you build it you run it" works only if there is an easy to use platform, I mean,... You shouldn't expect app developers to know: • terraform (Iac) • kubernetes • networking • security

oh, absolutely. the challenge comes in the form of leaders who have worked at large orgs with silo'd platform or devops teams who view that particular pattern as the solution to all their problems, when in fact it can result in "platform stuff" being everybody's and nobody's responsibility at the same time

Agree! We all need seniors, then, you have to think about the balance of juniors vs seniors in your company. If you run a startup, the balance between senior vs junior could be close to 50/50. Instead, if you work in a large enterprise with hundreds of developers, you may expect the balance to go like 20% (luckily) seniors, and 80% (mid-junior level). Then you have to consider the rotation (inner and outer)...

If you don't expect devs to know IaC, how do you find people to build your IDP ? What do you do till you have the IDP in place?

If you are already running a company, you probably have a "platform/sre/devops/infra/cloud" team right? So these people are the ones in charge of creating infra resources for the app teams (requests by creating tickets, chats... whatever). There is another approach, which is more like a startup where development teams are capable enough of creating the end-to-end vision, from development, infra, deployment, and day 2 operations.. (stream aligned teams) So it depends on the kind of business you are running and the current approach you are following, Greenfield companies/projects must follow (probably) a different approach.

I’ve had the chance to work with a number of large enterprises who are implementing IDP. The biggest and most common mistake is not involving developers in the design and build. You should have at least one “VIP” customer to help demonstrate business value throughout your iterative build process. I also spend a lot of my time talking about platform-as-a-product - how to internally sell the value, rather than the tech. (if anyone is interested, I can share links to a few conference gigs I’ve done on this)

P L E A S E @Bryan Ross

Sure, no problem - see the below links. My colleague @Coté also has some great resources that I’m sure he can share. Full disclosure, we both work at VMware but we talk largely around people/process which should apply across technologies. • VMware Explore Europe 2022 - https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video-landing.html?sessionid=1663681936722001rxHL&videoId=6315282523112 • Tanzu Talks Podcast - • Why you should treat your platform as product (white paper) - https://via.vmw.com/f1FLK1

You need a strong support from the CTO level, better if the CTO leads the effort. Building an IDP is a simplification effort thus your starting point will be a mix of teams and developers experienced and juniors supported by a platform team. In a big corp, probably you will have more than one embryonic IDP. The main KPI should be the developer NPS. The IDP is an effort that should be led by developers with a strong DevOps culture. Building an IDP for a small or new company doesn’t make sense.