In the last 5 years, we’ve watched the world's fastest growing engineering teams ditch development monoliths in favor of service-oriented architectures that speed time to market. And as microservices multiplied—making it harder to track ownership and quality—Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) emerged to help. But while the prospect of a single portal for developer productivity sounds enticing, veteran leaders know the perception of “one more tool” can make org-wide adoption challenging.

Internal developer portals (IDPs) have received a lot of attention lately. Internal Developer Portals serve as the engineering system of record—providing developers with the context and tools they need to ensure services and resources they own align with best practices for deployment readiness, operational maturity, security compliance, and more. But they do more than just act as a system of record for your whole stack. They also help drive alignment, improve MTTR, and can even reduce cloud spend.