Executive Summary
Executive summary of the Internal Developer Platform — four pillars (Backstage, ArgoCD, Kubernetes, Crossplane) delivering self-service from template to production in 30 minutes.
Problem Statement
Current pain points driving the IDP — slow provisioning (2–5 days), naming drift, no developer self-service, infrastructure sprawl, and onboarding friction.
Goals and Non-Goals
Platform goals — golden paths, one semantic key, self-service in 30 minutes, full catalog visibility, Crossplane IaC, RBAC by convention, CI validation. Non-goals clarified.
User Personas
Five user personas for the IDP — Product Engineer, Tech Lead, Platform Engineer, Engineering Manager, and Security/Compliance — with needs, friction points, and success states.
Requirements
Functional and non-functional requirements — naming convention, GitOps delivery, Backstage catalog, Crossplane IaC, RBAC, templates, CI validation, reliability, performance, security.
Platform Architecture
Platform architecture — management cluster topology, ArgoCD as delivery engine, Crossplane for cloud IaC, Backstage as developer portal. End-to-end service creation flow.
Key Capabilities
Five key capabilities — service self-service, cloud resource self-service, full-stack observability in Backstage, convention enforcement, and team onboarding in minutes.
Backstage Templates — Golden Paths
Backstage Scaffolder template chain — dependency order, output summary per template, required packages, and the two-PR workflow for every platform operation.
Security and Compliance
Security and compliance posture — no auto-deploy to prod, Sealed Secrets for credentials, convention validation CI, developer prod block via RBAC, network isolation.
Platform Services
Platform services catalog — Tier A and Tier B services, sync wave ordering, and the bootstrap sequence for cluster provisioning.
Success Metrics
Success metrics and KPIs — time to dev running, ticket reduction, catalog coverage, label compliance, onboarding time, DORA metrics tracking.
Roadmap
Four-phase roadmap — Foundation (months 1–2), Self-service Services (2–3), Full Coverage (3–5), and Maturity (5–8) with milestones per phase.
Risks and Mitigations
Risk register — teams skipping templates, Crossplane upgrade breakage, ArgoCD outage, Sealed Secrets key loss, catalog sync drift, and mitigation strategies.
Dependencies
Hard and soft dependencies — Kubernetes clusters, GitHub, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Backstage, OIDC provider. External integrations with PagerDuty, Slack, GitHub Actions.
Glossary
Glossary of platform terms — IDP, Golden Path, Domain, System, Component, Resource, Claim, XRD, Composition, ApplicationSet, Sealed Secret, DORA metrics, GitOps.