Infra cloud offering

Public cloud providers, which started off with platforms such as AWS, have revolutionised the way businesses build and operate applications. Their approach is based on:

• Immense choice of solutions: cloud platforms offer an extensive suite of services, and often many tools to solve the  – compute, storage, networking, security, databases, analytics, AI/ML, and more.
• Configurability: Developers and DevOps teams are given powerful options with both high and low level of complexity, to design, configure, and tailor environments to precise needs.
• Self-Service Freedom: Cloud offerings empower teams to experiment and innovate, but this freedom comes with complexity and a learning curve.
• Responsibility: With great power comes great responsibility; developers may need to architect, secure, and maintain cloud-native solutions, which often requires significant expertise.

While cloud offerings unlock nearly limitless possibilities, they also expose organisations to choice overload, fragmentation, and the risk of costly misconfigurations. Therefore organisations have to hire and spent a lot of time and money on setting up these environments, keeping the well maintained and find employees with very specific skill sets to perform these tasks at hand.

EIDP cloud offering

An Internal Developer Platform is a curated collection of tools, workflows, and services assembled within an organisation to abstract much of the complexity of building, deploying, and maintaining software. The key features include:

• Golden Paths: IDPs provide “golden paths” – predefined, best-practice workflows that cover the most common development scenarios out of the box.
• Abstraction: Rather than exposing the raw complexity of the cloud, IDPs offer streamlined services, allowing developers to focus on shipping code rather than managing infrastructure.
• Platform as a Service: Developers interact with the platform via APIs or web interfaces, consuming environments and tools as managed services rather than building them from scratch.
• Reduced Need for Platform Teams: Because the platform is maintained centrally and delivers ready-to-use solutions, there is less need for every team to hire specialised platform engineers or DevOps specialists.
• Opinionated Simplicity: By narrowing choices to what works best in the organisation’s context, IDPs eliminate confusion and inefficiency, even if this means fewer options or flexibility compared to the open cloud.

In practice, this means developers spend less time wrestling with infrastructure and more time delivering value to end users.

Comparing the Two Approaches

• Flexibility vs. Focus: Cloud offerings are broad and flexible but require expertise to harness. IDPs are focused and opinionated, guiding developers along proven paths.
• Complexity: Cloud users must handle configuration, monitoring, and scaling of services. IDPs handle much of this behind the scenes, reducing operational toil for developers.
• Developer Experience: With an IDP, developers interact with simplified interfaces and pre-approved tools, accelerating onboarding and productivity. Cloud offerings demand ongoing learning and vigilance.
• Organisational Overhead: Cloud-centric teams often need to build or hire for platform expertise. IDPs centralise this expertise, reducing the burden on individual product teams.
• Customisation: Clouds offer more room for custom solutions but at the cost of increased complexity and maintenance costs. IDPs may be less customisable but promote consistency and reliability.

Our Advice

There’s no strict one-size-fits-all solution. The choice between an Internal Developer Platform and a typical cloud offering is as much strategic as it is technical.

• Cloud offerings: Best suited for organisations with the scale, budget, and appetite to manage complexity and build highly bespoke solutions.

• IDPs: Provide a curated, optimised, and centrally managed experience that empowers developers to move faster with less friction, while reducing the burden on teams and budgets.

For most organisations, especially those aiming to scale efficiently and maximise developer productivity, starting with an IDP is often the fastest and most sustainable path forward. It’s a practical way to get the benefits of the cloud—without being buried under its complexity.

Try out our IDP to experience firsthand how much simpler and more productive your development workflows can become.