If you’re at all familiar with internal developer portals (IDPs), you probably know that they’re an engineering system for keeping track of your services and software. They handle everything from service tracking and security compliance to production readiness and API management and help developers track, improve, and build high-quality software– but that’s just part of what they do.
It's easy to see why IDPs were initially pigeonholed as "a developer tool." The early versions grew directly out of developer needs, focusing heavily on code repositories and deployment pipelines, with developer productivity teams looking to solve their own daily headaches. When Spotify launched Backstage, its platform for building developer portals, for example, its messaging centered around CI/CD workflows and developer onboarding. But treating IDPs as developer-only tools is like saying smartphones are just for making calls—-it misses the bigger picture of how IDPs have become central to how modern organizations operate.
Today's IDPs serve as the foundation for modern engineering organizations, connecting teams, tools, and processes that were previously siloed. They provide everyone, from developers and project managers to security teams and business leaders, with a shared view of an organization's technology. Want to automate that annoying cross-team approval process that used to take weeks? IDPs have you covered. Need to know who owns a service, its compliance status, and its performance metrics? It's all there. IDPs have become the place where technical and business decisions converge, making information accessible and actionable for everyone—not just developers.
A bird’s-eye view for DevOps and SREs
For DevOps and SRE teams, IDPs provide an overview of their entire infrastructure. Gone are the days of jumping between a dozen different dashboards and tools to piece together what's happening with their services. These platforms bring everything teams need into focus—-from real-time health metrics to incident response workflows. SREs can use features like Cortex’s Scorecards to monitor the health of critical services and proactively address incidents before they affect uptime. When incidents occur, they can quickly access runbooks, performance data, and service dependencies all in one place. For teams responsible for keeping the lights on, this can make life a lot easier.
SLOs and performance metrics aren't just numbers buried in a dashboard anymore; they're visible, actionable insights that help teams make better decisions about reliability and performance. With an IDP, the SREs know exactly where to find crucial information and can automate the routine stuff so they can focus on solving the interesting problems.
Infrastructure engineers can get more done with IDPs
Infrastructure engineers find IDPs invaluable for managing complex cloud environments at scale. They’re not spending time wondering which Terraform module manages a critical service or who last modified a CloudFormation template. IDPs bring clarity to complex infrastructure deployments, making it easier to track changes, manage dependencies, and maintain high standards. And making sure new services are provisioned correctly? Cortex’s Scaffolder makes it simple for developers to set up their services right the first time by providing templates and workflows for them, and this saves infrastructure engineers time down the line.
The platform gives infrastructure engineers a unified view of their entire tech stack, from Kubernetes clusters to cloud services, making it simpler to manage configurations and resource utilization. When it comes to maintaining infrastructure-as-code practices or planning capacity upgrades, having this single source of truth means less time coordinating between teams and more time optimizing infrastructure for scale.
Leadership made easy (or easier)
Onboarding and scaling teams is a constant challenge for tech organizations. Instead of relying on scattered documentation and tribal knowledge, teams can use IDPs as a map of the services with information that’s easy for anyone to find. IDPs break down the traditional silos between engineering, product, security, and operations teams, replacing them with a platform for collaboration.
Critical knowledge no longer lives solely in veteran employees' heads or gets buried in forgotten documents—instead, it becomes part of a living, evolving system that grows with the organization. Think about onboarding new team members (which, let's face it, happens constantly in tech). Instead of using the usual "Here's a bunch of links, good luck!" approach, managers can offer new hires access to a platform that makes it easy to understand the tech ecosystem from day one. With an IDP, leaders can guide an organization's technical operations, ensuring that as the company grows, its knowledge and capabilities grow with it. For leadership focused on operational efficiency, that means maintaining quality and consistency while scaling rapidly, without the usual growing pains.
Simplifying work for the security team
From a security team's perspective, IDPs are transforming how organizations protect their digital assets and maintain compliance. IDPs give security professionals visibility and control while reducing the friction that often exists between security and development teams.
Security staff can now embed their expertise directly into the development workflow. Rather than acting as gatekeepers who only review code at the end, they can define security policies, compliance requirements, and best practices that are automatically enforced throughout the development lifecycle. This shift from manual oversight to automated governance allows security teams to scale their impact across the organization.
IDPs provide security professionals with real-time dashboards showing the status of security initiatives across all services, as well as their vulnerability status to compliance metrics. When issues arise, there's no wasting time tracking down service owners. With clear ownership and SLAs, IDPs automatically connect security staff with the right team to fix the issue.
While setting SLOs has never been a major obstacle for security teams, they often struggle with actually enforcing these standards through engineering practices. Security teams can define ideal metrics but may lack the tools to systematically enforce these standards across development teams. IDPs help bridge this enforcement gap by providing easy ways to monitor metrics and set standards for security and track progress against deadlines. Security teams can create specific initiatives with clear timelines, automatically notify relevant developers through Slack or Jira integrations, and track completion percentages in real-time.
Solving problems for project managers
Project managers and technical program managers get a centralized, comprehensive view of the projects they manage with an IDP. They can track project velocities, deployment frequencies, and team productivity metrics. The platform can help them identify bottlenecks in workflows and opportunities for process improvement. With features like Cortex Scorecards, project managers can keep an eye on the status of projects spanning multiple teams and departments, instead of tracking individual people down to get status updates or nudging them to get things done. In our blog post on Scorecard migrations, we delved into some case studies on how IDPs improved things for project managers, including one in which Cortex made it possible for a company to migrate 97% of their services to new software in a matter of weeks.
What about the rest of the team?
If anyone in your organization is interfacing with engineering, they are likely benefiting from an IDP. Because IDPs drive engineering excellence across the organization, everyone has smoother interactions with the technology.
Insights for quality assurance
Let’s consider roles like quality assurance. With an IDP, QA teams gain visibility into test coverage and results across the entire service landscape. They can track quality metrics over time, identify recurring failure patterns, and correlate issues across different services and environments. Instead of hunting for information across multiple systems, they have a centralized view of test histories, deployment validations, and performance benchmarks. When issues arise, they can quickly access relevant logs, metrics, and deployment records to get started on root cause analysis.
Organize data for the data team
And don’t think we forgot about AI! Companies have been adding machine learning and AI to their products wherever they can for over a decade, but with the recent generative AI craze, pressure is mounting on AI engineers, ML engineers, and data scientists to manage AI models across the whole product. IDPs transform the typically chaotic work of model management into something far more manageable. With IDPs, the machine learning engineers can track which models are in production, how accurate the training data is, who's responsible for the models, and how they're performing across the organization. With custom ML scorecards, the ML engineers can track every model with detailed audit trails, including data usage patterns and approval workflows. This systematic approach helps ML teams maintain high standards while scaling their operations efficiently.
And let’s not forget the end user!
Ultimately, IDPs are making it possible for your engineering organizations to create a better product, and this benefit gets passed on to your users. Higher quality software leads to a more positive user experience and increased retention. Your users experience fewer outages because teams can spot and fix issues before they become problems. Features are more stable because testing and deployment processes are consistent and automated. Performance stays solid because monitoring and optimization are built into every service. They might not know about the IDP working behind the scenes, but they feel its impact in every interaction with your product. Their data stays secure because security checks are automated and consistent. Their experience remains smooth because teams can collaborate effectively on fixes and improvements. Their interactions with your platform are more reliable because teams can respond to issues faster. And perhaps most importantly, their trust in your platform grows stronger with every reliable interaction.
The bottom line
IDPs have evolved far beyond their initial scope as developer tools. They're now the backbone of modern engineering organizations, supporting everyone, including SREs, security teams, leadership, and end users. If you're still thinking of IDPs as just another developer tool, you’re missing out.
The real power of IDPs lies in their ability to bring order to chaos, to make knowledge actionable, and to facilitate collaboration across traditional boundaries. They turn tribal knowledge into organizational assets, make security an integral part of development, and help teams work more efficiently together.
Organizations can no longer afford to work in silos or rely on outdated tools and processes. IDPs like Cortex provide the foundation for building better software, more efficiently, more securely, and with less friction. They're not just tools for developers—they're tools for organization-wide transformation. Because in the end, it's about building better software that delivers real value to users. And that's something everyone in your organization can get behind.
If you want to discover who else an IDP like Cortex can help in your organization, book a demo today.
