Landing, expanding, and integrating your IDP

If you followed our recommendations in Chapter 3, you’ve interviewed the users, you’ve mapped the use cases, and you’ve designed your platform. Now comes the fun part – turning it into something real.

Let’s look at the most basic IDP. What does it do? Most importantly, users can authenticate to it with appropriate access and permissions. It has a CI system, a CD system, at least some basic security tooling such as scanning, and these days, something to generate an SBOM. What about the production location for the software that the developers are writing? Where is that? How does the promotion process look? Let’s look again at our IDP golden path from earlier in Figure 6.3.

There are a lot of pieces in this drawing, and software development should be iterative, which means we’re not going to be landing everything seen here all at once. So, let’s look at landing an IDP. What does...