Is a platform engineer the same as DevOps?
They overlap. DevOps is a way of working that joins development and operations. Platform engineering builds an internal product, the platform and its portal, so teams can work that way on their own. We sell both.
What is a DX platform?
A developer experience (DX) platform is another name for an internal developer platform: the portal and tooling that make building, deploying and operating services easier for a company's own engineers.
Which developer platform should we pick?
Pick by your services and your team, not by a ranking. We built MPI's portal on Backstage, with catalogs, deploy status, promotion, cost and security in one place.
Why would I choose Backstage over Port?
Answer three questions. Who will own the portal's code and hosting? With open-source Backstage, your team does. Do your catalog, promotion and cost views need custom plugins? With Backstage those are code you write and maintain. Is a hosted product's subscription worth more to you than that upkeep? We built MPI's portal on Backstage and can show what the plugins took.
Should we build or buy an IDP?
Build when your promotion rules, catalog and cost views are specific to you and you have engineers to keep the portal running. Buy when a standard catalog covers your needs and no engineer on your team can own the upkeep. Either way the pipelines, infrastructure as code and release gates under the portal are yours to build. Discovery (USD 7,000, 1–4 weeks) ends with that decision in the roadmap.
What does IDP Foundations include?
We set up and build your internal developer platform, connect the services you choose in the kickoff and add basic views, such as the service and API catalog, deploy status, cost, image vulnerabilities and CI health, as in MPI's portal. Fixed price USD 5,000, 2 weeks.
What does an engineering services company do?
It supplies engineering work under contract. Clouditive sells LATAM engineers by the hour at published rates (staff augmentation, 6-month minimum) and fixed-price packages with a published price and duration.
What is an internal developer platform (IDP)?
An internal developer platform is the set of tools, pipelines and a portal that a company builds so its developers can create, deploy and operate services on their own, within agreed rules. Typical parts are a service and API catalog, deploy and promotion status, infrastructure defined as code, and views of cost, vulnerabilities and CI health. Backstage is a common open-source base for the portal.
IDP Foundations sets up and builds the platform, connects the services you choose in the kickoff and adds basic views on top, such as the service and API catalog, deploy status, cost, image vulnerabilities and CI health, as in MPI's portal: USD 5,000, 2 weeks, fixed price. The release pipeline itself is the CI/CD & IaC package: USD 4,000, 2 weeks.
A Google Cloud platform for an AI marketing product
For Autonomah the whole platform is OpenTofu: Cloud Run services and jobs, Cloud SQL Postgres, Cloud Storage, a load balancer with Cloud Armor, workload identity and Secret Manager. Releases are tag-driven and deploy by image digest.
Backstage implementation
A Backstage implementation sets up the open-source portal, connects your services to its catalog and adds the views your engineers open every day: deploy status, cost, vulnerabilities and CI health. For a US transportation services company the catalog holds about 66 repositories, with 11 self-service templates. IDP Foundations builds the first version in 2 weeks for USD 5,000.
Kubernetes and Argo CD
Releases on Kubernetes should move from dev to production through Git, with checks that can stop a bad version. We run Argo CD with Kargo promotion, a 1-hour soak and an error-rate gate for a fintech SaaS platform, and Argo CD grew from 46 to 101 applications for a US transportation services company. Rollback is a re-promotion of the previous release.