Guido-Arndt Söldner is the CEO of Söldner Consult GmbH and focuses on cloud computing and enterprise programming.
Axel: What exactly is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?
Guido-Arndt: An Internal Developer Platform is a central platform created by a platform engineering team to provide developers with standardized and proven approaches for software development while enabling self-service capabilities. It includes a collection of tools and services that increase developer productivity, accelerate software delivery, and reduce manual operations. At its core, an IDP abstracts the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on coding without worrying about details such as deployment, CI/CD, or environment management.
IDPs also promote a better developer experience, reduce costs, and ensure consistency across the organization. Recently, IDPs have also entered infrastructure automation, taking over traditional ticket-based operations like resource provisioning, firewall management, permissions assignment, and similar tasks.
Axel: Which tools are we talking about? Are these local programs or backend tools?
Guido-Arndt: IDPs primarily focus on backend tools and services, not local programs on a developer’s machine. Local tools such as IDEs (e.g., VS Code) or simple scripts play a minor role; instead, an IDP focuses on cloud-based or internal backend systems that automate and scale infrastructure. It serves as a frontend and self-service portal for a typical platform engineering stack, which includes components such as CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure management, observability and monitoring, as well as security and governance.
Overview: Internal Developer Platforms
Guido-Arndt Söldner (left) in conversation with iX editor Axel Kannenberg
Axel: For which organizations is it worthwhile to set up an IDP? How complicated is it to set up and manage an IDP?
Guido-Arndt: IDPs are especially worthwhile for medium to large organizations where software development needs to scale and complexity increases. Small startups or teams with low complexity often don’t need an IDP, as it can be costly and excessive—simple DevOps practices are usually sufficient. IDPs are ideal for large developer teams of 50 or more to increase productivity and reduce cognitive load. They are helpful when tool sprawl and silos are an issue, for example in companies with a multi-cloud strategy or when fast release cycles are desired. They also provide visibility across tools and cloud environments.
Setting up and managing an IDP can require significant effort. It’s worth considering whether you want to develop and operate everything yourself or achieve your goals faster with external help, ready-made solutions, or dedicated plugins.
Axel: Since there are different projects, how do IDPs differ from each other?
Guido-Arndt: There is a wide range of IDP projects that differ in openness, focus, complexity, and features. Open-source IDPs like Backstage can be run confidently as a SaaS service or in your own data center. They often offer high flexibility, are easily customizable, and have a large community. There are also more and more ready-made solutions for different use cases. However, running them in-house can create higher overhead. Commercial portal solutions shine with fast onboarding and lower operational effort but are often less flexible when it comes to extensions.
Internal Developer Platforms: Backstage in Practice
