Commercial Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are a valuable investment for teams that want to move quickly toward addressing initiatives surrounding software ownership, production readiness, and improving developer experience. But there's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage.
Metrics provide visibility into engineering operations, allowing teams to iteratively improve. By tracking key data points like deployment frequency, lead time, server uptime, and change fail rate over time, organizations can spot trends, compare against benchmarks, and address process inefficiencies.
Internal Developer Portals and platforms do a lot—they're an all-in-one system of record, lever for defining and driving best practice, and vehicle for creating new software components. It's not hard to understand why undertaking such a project can be labor and resource intensive. But it doesn't necessarily have to be.