Congratulations—you’ve either built a platform or you’re deep into the process of creating one. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: Many engineering teams conflate “building the platform” with the ultimate goal. We get so wrapped up in the technical details—scripting everything in YAML, wrestling with container orchestration, navigating Kubernetes, setting up custom monitoring dashboards—that we lose sight of what really matters. The true objective is simple: Make it easier to deliver workloads, enhance the developer experience and ship business logic that delights customers and drives revenue.
I talk to engineering leaders daily who, after months or even years of effort, are left with Internal Developer Platforms that don’t get any adoption. It’s not that these leaders don’t know how to code or how to set up Kubernetes clusters—it’s that the building blocks they’re working with are too raw. Imagine juggling tasks like spinning up servers with custom scripts, maintaining ephemeral containers for development, cobbling together manual solutions for log aggregation, and writing endless Terraform modules for multi-cloud support. Each of these steps is crucial in isolation, but none inherently serves your company’s end customers. In fact, the sheer magnitude of these low-level primitives can grind even the most proactive teams to a halt.
The Problem With Homegrown Platforms
This painstaking process is akin to building a bespoke factory just to ship a single product.
Let’s say you have a bakery. Instead of focusing on perfecting your pastries, you spend months constructing each oven by hand, forging the mixers, and tinkering with the ventilation system. By the time your ovens are operational, customers have already found other bakeries—or lost interest in buying pastries altogether. The product itself—fresh, warm bread—gets overshadowed by the never-ending quest to optimize how the bread is made.
In the world of software, it’s all too common to see developers drowning in the “factory” details:
- Core K8s objects (Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingresses, etc.) for running workloads.
- Security and policies (RBAC, Pod security, Network Policies, Secrets) to lock down the environment.
- Networking (CNI, Services, Ingress, possible service mesh) to route traffic, with an eye on performance overhead.
- Storage (PVs, PVCs, StatefulSets) for persistent data requirements.
- Observability (logging, metrics, tracing) for performance visibility.
- Automation (Autoscalers, Operators, GitOps) to reduce manual toil.
- Developer experience (Helm, Kustomize, ephemeral environments, CI/CD pipelines, and a self-service interface).
Platform teams must take these foundational Kubernetes primitives and build a cohesive post-commit platform capable of running diverse workloads—microservices, stateful applications, and scheduled jobs—while delivering a consistent experience across multiple cloud providers. The platform must be secure, self-service, and multi-tenant, offering zonal and regional redundancy, robust networking, autoscaling, and multi-cloud consistency. It’s a tall order that can feel daunting just thinking about it.
You can’t overstate the importance of developer experience. Platform teams must meet engineers where they are or risk losing adoption. That means offering a consistent experience across multiple interaction points—UI, API, CLI, and GitOps. In most enterprises, 99% of engineers are strong developers rather than DevOps specialists, so expecting them to work directly with raw YAML or Terraform simply isn’t realistic. It’s all about finding the right abstractions across IaC, UI, and automated workflows. This is where a platform that sees tens of thousands of workflows and developers’ preferences daily comes into its own.
From Software Factories to Software Delivery
The irony, of course, is that we promised ourselves something different. With containers and cloud-native tech, we envisioned frictionless deployment pipelines and near-instant scalability. Yet somewhere along the line, many of us went from building products to building factories to produce those products. It doesn’t have to be this way, and there are precedents from other industries to prove it.
Consider game development. In the early days, studios often had to craft their own game engines from scratch. They built the rendering systems, physics engines, and level editors—all so they could eventually make a single game. Today, most studios don’t do that. Instead, they rely on battle-tested engines like Unreal Engine (UE), which abstract away the underlying complexities and let developers concentrate on creating immersive experiences. Building your own game engine is still possible—but it’s usually only reserved for the largest companies with extremely specialized needs. And even then, those engines are often maintained by entire teams dedicated solely to that purpose.
Mirroring the Game Engine Analogy
Much like game developers who have turned to Unreal or Unity, software developers deserve a robust platform that eliminates the guesswork of building ephemeral environments, ensuring regional redundancy and implementing zero-downtime deployments. The reason is obvious: Your energy should go into making the next killer feature for your user base, not wrangling with hand-crafted automation just to keep the lights on.
Yet, many Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) end up struggling to deliver tangible benefits. Sure, you might get them running in a year or two, but does that timeline really make sense in a fast-paced market? Does it make sense to sink significant resources into a homegrown solution that could be outdated by the time it goes live? As we’ve learned from the game engine world, leveraging an existing platform frees your engineers to innovate at the product level—and do so much more quickly.
Why Buying a Platform Makes Sense
“Buying” got a bad rep because the first generation of tools nailed the vision but fumbled the execution. Heroku excelled at providing a seamless, self-service developer experience, but it fell short when enterprises needed to run complex workloads in their own cloud environments. Meanwhile, Cloud Foundry offered an excellent application abstraction for reducing complexity, yet the underlying infrastructure proved both expensive and difficult to manage.
Both Cloud Foundry and Heroku, backed by significant resources and engineering talent, ultimately fell short. This raises the question: how can an internal platform team with fewer resources succeed in delivering a homegrown platform that meets all your requirements and truly delights your engineers?
This is why a new generation of off-the-shelf solutions is gaining traction. I’ve seen dozens of companies and spoken with countless engineers who have found that purchasing a ready-made platform is the difference between shipping on time and missing critical business milestones. And this doesn’t mean you lose control or flexibility. Modern platforms are built with extensibility in mind, giving you the power to customize workflows, integrate with existing toolchains, and deploy to your cloud environment of choice.
Take Northflank as an example. We’ve had hundreds of companies and over 30,000 developers adopt our platform to deploy microservices, jobs, and databases across pre-production and production environments. Instead of creating yet another “factory,” these teams tap into a platform that’s already equipped to handle the complexities of deployments, testing, auto-scaling, and regional redundancy. In other words, it’s a jump-start on the real work: delivering features that make a difference to end users.
Putting the Focus Back on Customers
Ultimately, the question is not whether you can build your own platform—plenty of teams can. The question is whether it’s the best use of your time and resources. If you’re stuck in a loop of never-ending code pipelines, manual environment setups, or do-it-yourself monitoring solutions, ask yourself: Is this really bringing value to our customers? If not, it may be time to break free from the build mindset and refocus on shipping features.
After all, the goal isn’t to become an expert at building factories. The goal is to bake, package and deliver the finest pastries in town. Similarly, your software team’s mission is to create new features, serve your users and drive revenue. By leveraging platforms that already handle the grunt work of infrastructure and orchestration, you can reclaim your bandwidth and do what matters most: deliver compelling experiences to your customers.
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