Overview of Internal Developer Portals

What is an internal developer portal? 

An internal developer portal is a single consolidated workspace for everyone involved in creating high-quality software. A portal provides engineers with autonomy, enhancing developer productivity and experience, elevating standards and collaboration, and driving operational consistency.

The portal provides an interface that abstracts software and infrastructure complexities to help engineers find and access the capabilities they need. It enables self-service, with built-in guardrails that enable engineers to carry out tasks on their own while following a golden path.

Gartner defines internal developer portals as tools “that enable self-service discovery, automation, and access to reusable components, tools, platform services, and knowledge assets in modern software development. [...] These portals improve developer experience and service reliability while ensuring centralized governance and shared visibility across teams.”

By 2028, Gartner predicts that 85% of organizations with platform engineering teams will provide internal developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate product innovation, up from 60% in 2025.

Back in 2024’s State of Internal Developer Portals, we found an industry still in its formative stages, with definitions of both platform engineering and portals still maturing. Yet, the concept of a developer portal widely appealed to engineering teams. 

In our 2025 report, we found that portals were becoming widely used as a tool to maintain engineering metadata, with 53% of engineers and engineering leaders using an internal developer portal’s software catalog as a means to ensure the data they rely on is updated and reliable. 

This guide explores why portals are gaining popularity, the challenges they address, and the key pillars of an internal developer portal and highlights key considerations for implementation.

It’s important to remember that while every dev team is unique, a successful platform engineering project starts with understanding how internal developer portals function. As organizations navigate this evolving environment, teams may find it useful to adopt a platform-as-product mindset, where internal developer portals are designed to align technical capabilities with the “product” experience tailored to your team’s structure, culture, and practices.

Why do I need an internal developer portal? 

The main reason anyone within an engineering organization needs an internal developer portal is to improve how they build, deliver, and manage software. It's not just about productivity — it's about creating a central source of truth, aligning teams, and driving operational consistency.

An internal developer portal acts as the backbone of the software delivery lifecycle. It brings together developers, DevOps, security, and governance functions into a shared space that enables faster, higher-quality software delivery. When software can be shipped more reliably and efficiently, it directly impacts customer satisfaction, revenue, and reduces churn.

For users of the portal — engineers, engineering managers, SREs, and other business stakeholders — the goal is to enhance the developer experience. This means:

• Having a single source of truth for services, apps, APIs, ownership, and documentation.
  
• Helping teams identify bottlenecks, align with security and ops on standards, and improve based on real metrics.
  
• Enabling developers to take action with built-in standards through automated integrations across cloud and DevOps tools.
  

Ultimately, a great portal boosts productivity, strengthens collaboration, and supports retention by making the engineering environment more enjoyable and effective.

Who uses internal developer portals? 

Below are some examples of how different people use internal developer portals. 

• ‍Developers: The primary users, leveraging self-service actions for deployments, resource access, and configuration management. Developers gain full visibility into software, dependencies, APIs, CI/CD, and documentation through the catalog. The portal enhances autonomy, maintains developer flow state, and ensures compliance via scorecards.
• ‍Platform engineers: Design, maintain, and optimize the portal to enable self-service while ensuring reliability and developer productivity. They will be judged on a number of KPIs such as time to first commit, MTTR, MTBF, and platform adoption. The portal helps reduce onboarding time and streamline the SDLC, supporting platform engineering in meeting and exceeding their targets for all of these KPIs.
• ‍Site reliability engineers (SREs): Use the service catalog to monitor system reliability, implement incident management frameworks, and shift-left on reliability improvements. Scorecards and dashboards help prevent incidents and automate operational tasks.
• ‍DevOps engineers: Improve efficiency by integrating CI/CD pipelines, reducing 'ticket ops', and automating workflows within the portal.
• ‍Engineering managers: Use scorecards and dashboards to track compliance, monitor performance, and align engineering efforts with business outcomes. The portal provides better visibility across the SDLC for improved decision-making.
• ‍Security engineers: Identify and prioritize vulnerabilities (CVEs), enforce security policies before production, and track compliance across multiple tools.
• ‍FinOps: Gain insights into cloud costs, engineering efficiency, and resource allocation.

What are the benefits of an internal developer portal?

• Effective planning and bottleneck identification
  
  • Dashboards display relevant information from the software catalog, scorecards, and self-service actions, helping users plan their tasks. For example, developers can manage PRs, Jira tickets, on-call shifts, and security issues.
  • Managers can quickly approve requests, track initiatives, and identify bottlenecks or teams causing delays.
  • Developers receive alerts in context with necessary information, aiding in prioritizing and managing incidents effectively.
    
• Speeding up developer onboarding
  
  • The software catalog provides insights into the tech stack, ownership, and dependencies, reducing reliance on tribal knowledge.
  • Self-service actions minimize waiting times for access to tools, such as getting cloud resource permissions or creating environments.
  • Personalized dashboards display resources, key metrics, and onboarding documentation, improving time to first commit.
    
• Lower mean time to recovery (MTTR)
  
  • A centralized hub with integrated data from services, APIs, CI/CD, and incident management tools enhances incident response efficiency.
  • SREs can create incident management frameworks, scorecards, and self-service actions for on-call engineers.
  • During an incident, developers use self-service actions for temporary permissions and runbooks, and the software catalog provides them with context and ownership information related to the issue at hand.
    
• Higher productivity
  
  • Centralizing tools and providing self-service capabilities streamline developer workflows and drive better outcomes.
  • Self-service actions throughout the SDLC, from planning to production, reduce total cycle time, improve standards, and enhance key metrics.
  • Dashboards in the portal measure the impact on SDLC, PR review times, and DORA metrics.
    
• Enhancing the developer experience
  
  • A portal improves developer experience by replacing manual processes, providing a centralized view of assets, and reducing cognitive load.
  • Self-service actions and automations reduce wait times and improve feedback loops.
  • Customizable dashboards ensure developers have easy access to necessary information.
    
• Increasing developer efficiency
  
  • A centralized platform for managing tasks, tools, and resources improves developer efficiency.
  • Self-service actions and automations streamline workflows, reduce context switching, and speed up tasks like scaffolding new microservices.
  • Manager dashboards track and measure developer efficiency against benchmarks.
    
• Higher security, compliance, and governance standards
  
  • The software catalog provides visibility of software assets, with scorecards grading code quality, migration quality, and operational performance.
  • Developers can request temporary exceptions, and managers can track compliance with standards through a central view.
  • Automated alerts and self-service actions help maintain and improve production readiness.
    
• Better managing production readiness
  
  • An internal developer portal balances speed and thorough checks by tiering services, associating assets with standards, and tracking compliance.
  • Automated tasks and self-service actions enable quick reactions to issues.
  • Initiatives track team progress towards new standards, enhancing production reliability.
    
• Higher engineering velocity
  
  • Centralizing tools, data, and workflows in a portal reduces context-switching and streamlines resource access, boosting engineering velocity.
  • Integration across the development lifecycle allows quick access to information, task automation, and consistency.
  • Self-service capabilities accelerate the development process, enhancing productivity.
    
• Reduced and controlled costs
  
  • Consolidating cost data in the portal shows connections to domains, applications, and services, aiding cost management.
  • FinOps use the portal to set cost standards and guardrails, helping developers understand service costs.
  • Managers can identify big spenders, set alerts for budget thresholds, and manage ephemeral environments effectively.
• Pave golden paths
  • By centralizing tools, documentation, and self-service actions that have standards baked in, the portal ensures developers can easily access and follow these golden paths, reducing friction and cognitive load. This consistency helps maintain high standards, accelerates onboarding, and minimizes errors.
  • Standards of existing resources are monitored using scorecards, and any ‘bad’ resources can revert back to the golden path with day-2 operations self-service actions (eg. updating an outdated RDS cluster version). 

Internal developer portal vs. external developer portal 

An external developer portal supports external developers, partners, or customers by providing access to APIs, SDKs, documentation, and support, fostering an external developer community. Discord’s community developer portal is a well-known example of an external developer portal, which invites new joiners to learn about how to build Discord apps and contribute to the wider user community. 

In contrast, an internal developer portal is designed for an organization’s own engineering teams, offering a centralized interface to streamline collaboration, enforce standards, and enhance transparency in the development lifecycle. It enables developers to work autonomously while ensuring they comply with best practices and security protocols, while engineering managers use it to track metrics, improve workflows, and optimize software delivery.

Internal developer platform vs. internal developer portal 

When it comes to optimizing software development workflows, internal developer platforms and internal developer portals play distinct but complementary roles. While both aim to enhance the developer experience (DevEx) and streamline engineering processes, they serve different functions within an organization’s infrastructure. 

The internal developer platform provides access to the backend infrastructure necessary for software development, but it is not sufficient on its own. The platform centralizes everything DevOps does — but it still requires an interface that provides the right abstractions for developers and promotes golden paths.

Internal developer portals solve this problem. The portal enhances the developer experience by providing an accessible and intuitive interface for interacting with these tools. It is built for the questions and needs of different teams.

The portal enables capabilities for: 

• Metadata maintenance for everything microservice and application-related in your engineering, from CI/CD metadata through cloud resources, Kubernetes, AppSec, cost and more. (this familiarizes developers with the tech stack, helps them understand who the owners of different services are, and lets them access documentation for each service directly from the portal – and keep track of deployments and changes made to a given service).
• Self-service (so developers can complete tasks without tickets, approvals or requests); 
• Engineering standards enforcement; 
• Engineering metrics monitoring and improvement

Together, the platform and portal form an essential structure that optimizes productivity, standardizes processes, and simplifies the complexities of software development. This enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications more efficiently and effectively.

Further reading:
‍Read: Build the perfect internal developer platform
‍Read: Building InnerSource practices with an internal developer portal

Internal developer portal components, features and capabilities

The main pillars of a portal are:

Software catalog

What it is: 

The software catalog is the system of record for all your engineering assets. It reflects your SDLC, enabling developers to quickly understand service ownership, tech stack, documentation, and dependencies — all in one place. It is the foundation for the rest of the portal experience.

Key capabilities:

• Bring your own data model: Fully flexible and customizable
  
• Pre-built catalogs: Microservice catalog, API catalog, event catalog, skill exchange
  
• Catalog customization:
  
  • Blueprints: Define the assets your portal manages — such as services, CI jobs, cloud environments, pods, databases, etc.
    
  • Relations: Set logical dependencies between blueprints (e.g., which packages a microservice uses, or which clusters belong to which cloud accounts)
    
  • Users & teams
    
  • Role-based access control (RBAC)
    

Why it matters: A unified catalog enables better onboarding, improves incident response, reduces manual work, and establishes a single source of truth across the SDLC.

Integrations

Purpose: Unify tools into a single experience by connecting external systems, tools, and data sources.

Key capabilities:

• Centralized integration layer
• Use out-of-the-box plugins, write your own custom ones, or use other integration methods
• Supports ingestion of metadata, events, and runtime data from across your stack
  

Why it matters: A portal is only as powerful as its integrations. By unifying tools, you can eliminate DevTool sprawl and surface relevant data in context.

Self-service actions

What they are: Self-service actions enable engineers to perform tasks independently without needing to request assistance from DevOps or platform engineers — all through forms that are in-built with the right guardrails to ensure they keep to the golden path.

Key capabilities:

• Forms and wizards
  
• Backend triggers
  
• Approval workflows
  
• Permissions and RBAC
  

Why it matters: Developer self-service is one of the most impactful features of an internal portal. Instead of bouncing between tools and tickets, developers can get what they need instantly — whether provisioning infrastructure, deploying services, or accessing logs.

From a platform engineer's perspective, forms are fully customizable. You can abstract away complexity and only expose what the developer needs to see — similar to booking a flight without choosing the pilot. This creates better autonomy, fewer support bottlenecks, and happier developers. We found that 94% of engineers were dissatisfied with their current self-service tools such as CI/CD tools - and that’s perhaps because these tools don’t abstract away complexity, embed standards or provide the right level of autonomy for users like portals do.

Scorecards & Initiatives

Purpose: Establish, track, and enforce standards across teams using scorecards and initiatives.

Key capabilities:

• Scorecards to grade:
  
  • Production readiness
    
  • Code quality
    
  • Migration completeness
  • Operational performance
    
  • Documentation health
    
  • AppSec compliance
• Create exceptions for users or teams that do not need to comply

• Extend compliance for a set task to other users or teams 
• Align efforts of complying with standards with organizational goals via initiatives
  

Why it matters: Scorecards provide visibility for engineers and managers on areas of compliance and progress of compliance. You can measure team performance, highlight gaps, and drive improvements. Combined with automations and dashboards, scorecards turn standards into actionable, trackable outcomes.

A portal also provides a 360-view of your engineering metrics across the development lifecycle. That includes metrics used by engineering leaders to better understand how software is being developed and delivered (these are metrics that many organizations may have tracked via software engineering intelligence platforms or in-house tools that analyze raw data from code repositories). They include things like deployment frequency, and the focus on the health of processes and teams. Then there are metrics focused around standards from ownership, documentation, monitoring, testing and even AppSec or cost. 

Having all of these metrics in one place means teams can:

• Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the development lifecycle
• Track the adoption of platform features and self-service actions
• Ensure compliance with security and governance policies
• Measure the impact of GenAI tools on productivity and code quality

But more importantly, they can improve on their metrics.

Once benchmarks are set, the next step is putting insights into action. Teams can:

• Use scorecards to evaluate performance against key benchmarks.
• Set up automated alerts that notify managers when teams fall below success thresholds.
• Optimize workflows by surfacing key data on developer productivity, service health, tool usage, and compliance. 
• Optimize DORA metrics with targeted improvements — for example:
  
  • If code reviews are too slow, implement automated nudges to keep them on track.
  • If MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) is too high, centralize incident data or automate responses to accelerate resolution.

By turning data into actionable improvements, analytics helps organizations continuously refine their developer experience, platform efficiency, and overall engineering effectiveness.

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Interface designer 

Purpose: 

Every organization is unique. And within that organization, every user and team has its own priorities. That’s why portal customization is a core pillar for organizations. Every layer of the portal can be customized; from the branding and logo of the portal itself, to the sidebar, enabling your team to navigate as easily as possible. Portal customization is about increasing and retaining platform adoption by making it as easy-to-use, with the most relevant information at the users’ fingertips. 

Capabilities: 

• Homepage
• Sidebar
• Branding (Logo & Colors)
• Widgets
• Dashboards & Pages
• AI Chat
• Banners

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Workflow automations

Purpose: Automations tie together the different pillars of the portal, improving efficiency and operations. They help teams orchestrate complex workflows and ensure smooth operations with minimal manual intervention. They enable teams to automate repetitive tasks, trust in the notifications and alerts they get, and enforce policies.  

Access controls

Purpose: Controlling who sees what and who does what.

‍Why it matters: Access controls affect all parts of the platform, it’s a horizontal pillar. They include role-based access control (RBAC), dynamic permissions based on the software catalog, workspace management, and more. 

What are the top use cases for an internal developer portal? 

The following use cases are the top use cases that we’ve found when we asked our customers what they were using the portal for:

• Discoverability and context: Create a comprehensive software catalog encompassing all company resources, from CI/CD metadata to cloud services and Kubernetes, helping developers find what they need and reduce duplication.
  
  
• ‍Driving organizational standards: Utilize scorecards to define clear standards for any entity within the software catalog, ensuring production readiness, code quality, migration quality, operational performance, and more.
  
  
• ‍Shipping faster to production: Enable developer self-service to grant developers autonomy in performing routine tasks, such as spinning up new microservices or creating ephemeral environments, without relying on other teams.
  
  
• Simplifying Kubernetes for developers: Abstract Kubernetes complexity with self-service actions and catalog insights, allowing developers to operate efficiently without deep K8s expertise.
  
  
• Incident management and MTTR reduction: Leverage the portal for faster incident resolution by providing context, automating runbooks, and enabling temporary access to on-call personnel for immediate response.
  
  
• Tracking and improving engineering metrics: Use dashboards and scorecards to track DORA metrics, team performance, open PRs, assigned tasks, and development lifecycle effectiveness at service, team, and organizational levels. Initiatives can be used to improve on existing metrics. You can even measure the impact of any subset of tools — such as GenAI tools — on engineering metrics.
  
  
• Onboarding and documentation: Improve developer onboarding by centralizing documentation, automating tool access, and maintaining a single source of truth for assets.
  
  
• ‍API governance: Enrich API metadata in the software catalog to provide context and structured performance feedback. Facilitate API scaffolding via self-service and use scorecards to ensure API quality and compliance, while tracking governance improvements.‍
  
  
• Optimizing and contextualizing cloud costs: Import and associate resources with their costs in the software catalog. Provide engineering management with dashboards containing cost information to drive initiatives aimed at reducing cloud costs.‍
  
  
• Observability and incident response: Provide real-time monitoring, configure status dashboards, and integrate observability tools (e.g., DataDog) to enhance system visibility and troubleshooting.
  
  
• Security and access management: Manage access requests for services, enforce RBAC (role-based access control), and streamline security processes like branch permissions and API management.
  
  
• Managing feature flags: Use the software catalog to provide context and enable self-service actions for toggling feature flags on or off as needed.
  
  
• Migrations: Ensure the migration of deprecated versions by using the software catalog to keep services, APIs, and packages up-to-date with the latest version.‍
  

How do you get started with an internal developer portal? 

There are a number of things you can do to get started with an internal developer portal. Here is a list of resources we think can help you:

• The top 10 things to consider when selecting a portal
• How to get started with a portal MVP
• Our documentation

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