What do you use an internal developer portal for?

Now that we’ve established what an internal developer portal is, the more practical question is: what do you use it for?

First, it’s central system of record, it provides developers and other team members with everything they need in one place; information on services, APIs, resources, dependencies and more.

Then, consider three core benefits that the portal offers:

Paving a golden path for developers and ensuring they stay on it
Enabling managers to define and drive standards
Providing leadership with engineering intelligence and insights

All three of these ensure continuous improvement.

So what does this look like in practice?

Golden paths for developers

Golden paths provide a balance between giving developers complete freedom and requiring DevOps to manage everything meticulously - just to ensure developers don’t veer of course. The golden path means that standards set by platform engineers are easily adhered to as they are embedded into tasks that developers can accomplish independently. This involves using automation or self-service options.

Golden paths reduce the cognitive load placed on developers by enabling them to complete tasks without in-depth knowledge of a wide range of tools and infrastructure. And they increase velocity. A portal supports the golden path as it provides autonomy and a simple way to do things.

It does this by offering the following steps:

Self-service actions: Developers use simplified forms to create resources like Kubernetes clusters, with security, networking, and version control standards pre-defined by platform engineers and loosely coupled with the backend.
Scorecards: Platform engineers and subject matter experts can use scorecards to define standards for services/resources and ensure alignment with organizational goals. They can determine which metrics to use and what thresholds to use for grading the resources. Automating the monitoring of these standards in a portal provides an efficient way to maintain standards and to communicate them to developers.
Day-2 operations as self-service: Developers can proactively upgrade or fix resources that deviate from the golden path, using self-service actions for tasks like updating clusters or restarting services.

Enabling managers to define and drive standards and quality

Engineering managers and leaders are often plagued with a fear of non-compliance of engineering standards - and many struggle to define these standards in the first place. This is down to data existing all over the place and without context, making it difficult to track standards.

The result: production readiness or AppSec are tracked in spreadsheets, increasing workload and maintenance, and the manual method leads to errors. These same concerns can also impact other practitioners that track standards (eg. SREs checking if standards are met before setup). This can slow down the entire software development process, and negatively impact the organization.

It also goes against the grain; standards are a definition of done, a definition of what good looks like. Without being able to determine and maintain standards, teams risk delivering inconsistent results, compromising quality, and eroding trust in their engineering practices. In turn, this can impact the way existing engineers and potential hires see the organization.

An internal developer portal collects the data from all of the tools, and makes it easy for the manager to track and communicate to developers what needs to be done, automatically.

Using scorecards

The portal’s scorecards allow managers to define, communicate, monitor, and enforce engineering standards on top of any software entity in the portal (API, service, resource etc).

Each scorecard comprises rules and conditions, categorized into levels like gold, silver, and bronze. These scorecards can assess production readiness, code quality, migration quality, operational performance, DORA metrics, AppSec compliance, and working agreements like PR review times.

Managers can link scorecards to specific checks (eg. code quality with code coverage) and set thresholds. This enables ongoing monitoring and also importantly - alerts on scorecard changes. The internal developer portal facilitates change initiatives by enabling managers to create their own dashboards to track compliance and use automations, such as creating Jira tickets for critical issues or sending Slack notifications to prompt developers to act.

Providing leadership with engineering metrics and insights

Engineering leaders have so many priorities and need an efficient way to know whether their team is on track to meet its goals, if there are any bottlenecks in the workflow, if there are ways of supporting their teams more effectively, and how to prioritize.
The internal developer portal is the perfect place to consolidate your engineering metrics. The portal’s software catalog pulls together all data related to the SDLC - about microservices, APIs, cloud resources, PRs, compliance and more. By aggregating data throughout every stage of the life cycle a portal can show you the connections between different metrics. For instance, finding out that a higher deployment frequency correlates with an increase in incidents - this could signal the team is prioritizing speed over quality.

The portal’s insights covers the core metrics provided in software engineering intelligence platforms (such as those related to developer productivity and developer experience) and adds standards-based metrics (such as production readiness, incident management, cloud costs, security, etc) that are just as valuable and core for your success.

This means you can identify and investigate non-compliance with standards, by both defining the standards and tracking them with scorecards. Beyond analytics, portals empower managers to drive continuous improvement by acting on the metrics within the portal.

For example, the portal can transform how working agreements - a set of guidelines for teams to get the best from each other - are created, tracked and maintained. They help to change habits and drive significant improvement.

A portal can turn working agreements into measurable metrics using scorecards. Teams can set targets for key metrics like deployment frequency or pull request review time, which are automatically tracked by pulling data from integrated tools like version control systems, code review platforms and issue trackers. This real-time tracking makes working agreements actionable, allowing team members to monitor performance and stay aligned with expectations. The portal's reporting and dashboard capabilities help visualize trends, identify bottlenecks, and foster accountability, enabling continuous improvement and ensuring that agreements remain relevant and effective over time.

Internal developer portal use cases

As a starting point, you may want to use the portal as a way to abstract the complexity away from your platform, bring features to production and provide users with information they need and self-service actions such as scaffolding a microservice. But that’s just the beginning; there are endless possibilities with your portal.

Here are some examples:

AppSec

Use the portal’s software catalog to view and prioritize security alerts, and understand the security posture of applications. Set security standards and track them with scorecards, launch initiatives to upgrade libraries, and ensure newly created assets are secure by default.

Further reading:
Read: How internal developer portals improve incident management

Incident management

Enable your SRE team to create a framework for incident management. Use scorecards to ensure your SREs are incident-ready, evaluate and analyze health metrics and KPIs. Enable devs to investigate incidents using the software catalog to get the information they need, and use self-service actions to scale-up a cluster, rollback to a previous version or restart a service.

Further reading:
Read: How internal developer portals improve incident management

FinOps

Enable managers to see the cost per team, services or namespace by bringing cost data into the software catalog. Track compliance with FinOps requirements (eg. tagging resources) through scorecards, and auto-terminate dev environments using automations.

Further reading:
Read: Using an Internal Developer Portal For Superior FinOps Visibility

API management
Find an API and get more information about the API through the software catalog. Monitor an API’s health using scorecards, use self-service actions to rate an API, scaffold a new API, deploy an API or register an API.

Further reading:
Read: Manage your APIs using an internal developer portal

Other use cases include:

Further reading:

Read: The top 10 ways to use an internal developer portal which takes learnings from our customers.

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