09. What Platform Engineers Must Have in Their IDP

By Dan Donahue, Principal Solutions Architect at Nethopper.io

Internal Developer Platform (IDP) Architecture

An IDP (Internal Developer Platform) is required to build and manage infrastructure (both private and public clouds) using IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code), deploy applications, automate CI/CD pipelines, while providing observability for all those domains. 

There are two architectural components required for a cloud native IDP: a DevOps framework and secure multi-cluster networking.

1. A DevOps framework that supports a cloud native IDP is the first architectural decision platform engineers need to make.

   • GitOps is widely considered the foundational element of an IDP architecture.

2. An IDP that manages an ecosystem of clusters requires communication between clusters.

   • This requires multi-cluster networking, which must be secure and not needlessly complex. 

Kubernetes provides simple intra-cluster communication but does not natively support inter-cluster communication. Notice I didn’t say multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is an industry term that typically refers to support for the big cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure). Multi-cluster networking is a technical term used in this document referring to communication between any variation of clusters, whether private (on-prem) or public. Multi-cluster can also be referred to as hybrid clouds. These two architectural components are detailed in the following subsections.

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