Platform Engineering 101 Building Internal Developer Platforms with Grace Jansen
In her Devnexus presentation, Grace Jansen, Developer Advocate at IBM, addressed one of the biggest challenges facing today’s developers: cognitive overload. The industry-wide push to “shift left” has saddled developers with growing responsibilities, from managing containers and pipelines to addressing security. Combined with the overwhelming number of tools in the cloud-native ecosystem, this creates steep learning curves and slows innovation. Jansen argued that the answer lies in platform engineering, the natural evolution of DevOps, where dedicated teams build and maintain the foundational workflows and tools that free developers to focus on writing code.
The centerpiece of her solution is the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), described as a centralized “recipe book” of curated tools and services. Accessed through an Internal Developer Portal, the IDP provides developers with a single, simplified interface to the entire toolchain. Jansen highlighted the measurable benefits of this approach, including reduced wait times, faster deployments, and higher developer satisfaction. Importantly, she noted that an IDP is not a one-size-fits-all product but a tailored collection of open-source tools that meet an organization’s specific needs—citing examples such as Backstage and Red Hat Developer Hub.
The session concluded with a practical demo using Red Hat Developer Hub, where Jansen showed how a developer could quickly bootstrap a new application with a pre-defined software template. This template automatically configures pipelines, security checks, and deployments, providing a unified view of the entire process—from code commit to running application. The key message was clear: by reducing complexity through platform engineering, teams can empower developers to spend more time innovating and less time wrestling with infrastructure. For modern organizations, building a strong internal platform isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about enabling creativity at scale.
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