Choosing an internal developer portal is hard, but Port made it easy

Platform engineering has quickly become a solution for all of the complexities in modern software organizations, whether you are in startups, scale-ups, or big enterprises. While it paves the road for faster innovation, streamlined operations, and good financial dispositions, there is still more to it than infrastructure, CI/CD, security, and other highly relevant topics.

While a platform solves many things, there is still a need for lowering the inconsistencies in tooling, workflows, and the like, which can turn into quite a cognitive load for a software developer who really wants to focus on their solution domain. In most cases, there is a need for hiding complex legacy solutions, abstracting workflows, and the like. This can be done by creating your internal abstractions on top of a wide range of tools, but not all organizations have the time or the money to jump into such a project. This is where the power of a good and flexible internal developer portal can come into play.

Over the years, I have been a big believer in building the platform before introducing a portal, but my opinion has changed as the portal might be the first step into building a good platform. What comes first really depends on the portal, the organization, the culture, and the capabilities of the platform team.

What makes a good developer portal?

It is my impression that many organizations added a developer portal because they saw others doing it. Often, that leads to a stale portal spinning in a corner without content, and no one adjusts the portal to fit the needs of the business. If you are lucky, there might be a half-populated service catalog and a proof-of-concept workflow. This is not where a developer portal should end its life.

A developer portal should be the single signpost for the developer, or if you are as old as I am, it should be the start page of your browser. It should be a living and breathing site that surfaces all the information a developer needs to get their day going, hence the name developer portal, not stale data portal.

What is needed?

Enhanced Developer Experience (DX)

First of all, you should make sure that developers don’t have to scavenge through multiple tools, repositories, and YAML files. You should speak in a straightforward language that development teams understand, and it shouldn’t really be a surprise that all developers aren’t fluent in Terraform, YAML, or the like that is being used to spin up infrastructure.

Seamless integration with your stack

Often, it’s hard to leverage all the good parts of a portal because you need to write custom bits and pieces to ensure everything conforms to the portal. The better option would allow you to map your tools APIs into the portal, and let you spend more time on building that great DX.

Hassle-free governance

By leveraging golden paths that serve as workflows when you need to create a new service or application. Dashboards that indicate results of recent vulnerability scanning, and how to mitigate them if that work hasn’t been shifted to AI yet.

Profit and loss at your fingertips

For many large organizations, it is important to know the operational costs associated with services and applications. A developer portal can help you correlate expenses and service performance to indicate whether your services are running at a financially responsible level.

If fulfilling the expectations for a developer portal sounds like a tedious job, and you are already starting to think about recruiting a team just to run your portal, you should probably consider if you have the right tool for the job. A perfect portal comes with a small operational load, and it should be a tool you leverage, not something you build these days. There might be cases in the regulated spaces where you don’t have the option, but then you are most likely already used to having to add additional resources compared to the organizations that can leverage public clouds with ease.

Read more in this blog post: Choosing wisely: A blueprint for internal developer portal selection 

Why I’m excited about Port

Looking at the variation of developer portals I’ve seen over the years, it has been complex to figure out which one was the best fit for the customer. While no tool fits everyone, Port.io is in the top tier when I recommend a developer portal.

What makes Port special?

Data modelling

When you start out with Port you put your attention into defining blueprints, which are the basic building blocks of your portal. Each blueprint consists of properties which you can populate from your different integrations. Best of all you are not forced to sit and build your model in their UI, you can script the model through their API or leverage Terraform or Pulumi.

Integration with your tools

There are quite a few pre-defined blueprints and integrations that should cover most of your toolchain out of the box. If you can’t find the tool of your choice, there is an open framework available to build your custom integrations.

Lower operational costs

Since Port is SaaS-only, there is no hidden cost associated with maintaining and upgrading your portal as new versions are released.

Accessible for everyone

While the developer portal often is a tool for the developer, Port goes even further. Based on the needs of your different personas, you can model pages and dashboards as you need. The developer might see a security score for their application, SREs can look at the broad perspective of all the running applications, and the CISO can get an aggregated view.

Enterprise-ready

Fine-grained access control, audit logs, policies, and dashboards, you can get all of the insights that make life in governance and compliance easy.

Compared to Backstage, Port drastically reduces your time-to-value as it’s a fully fledged portal and not a framework for building them. 

Final thoughts

Choosing the right portal has become easier for organizations as Port has brought a platform engineering tool to the market that supports multiple aspects of your organization. It’s not only about enabling developers; it also covers a wider range of personas and fits with the tools and workflows that platform or operations teams use on a daily basis.

Port is the tool I wish we had years ago, but now it’s finally here, ready to boost your business and remove friction in daily tasks.