There Is No Silver Bullet: The Complexities of Building IDPs
Talkat Platform Engineering Day North America 2025 · on Monday, 2025-11-10· at 10:40· Building B | Level 5 | Thomas Murphy Ballroom 2-3·
summary
An internal developer platform is more integration and policy work than picking tech: an IDP at Viasat runs on EKS + Cilium + Apigee with Terraform for operator-managed infra, Helm charts for user-facing deploys, Argo CD centralized (split into admin and customer Argo CD instances), Backstage templates for onboarding, and Kubecost/Prometheus for visibility. Service mesh needs meet real needs not hype—Cilium covers 90% of use cases so Istio is optional—and multi-cluster, auth, and UX choices drive most surprises.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:08What is an internal developer platform
- 3:59When you need an IDP
- 6:06Myth of the silver bullet tech stack
- 6:27Service mesh choices complexity
- 10:37Shared ownership challenges
- 13:07Centralization decisions complexity
- 15:37Poor UX and support demands
- 17:47Getting started and slow returns
- 20:56Measuring developer experience
- 21:57Key takeaways
- 22:40Q&A
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