Why every Internal Developer Platform needs a backend

The first wave of early Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) has settled, revealing the need for a focus on backends by infrastructure platform engineers. Modern infrastructure and operations teams must address questions such as managing, securing, and maintaining resources created in self-service across public and private cloud estates. A backend is necessary to drive automation and standardization, which are key value drivers in platforms that reduce time to market (TTM) and cost for the business. Automation involves low automation leading to low return, while high automation leads to high return. Standardization requires a backend to manage the entire lifecycle of resources and enforce global standards across all dependent services. A platform reference architecture with pre-configured frontend and backend can help in understanding these concepts more deeply.