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Showing content from https://thenewstack.io/googles-cloud-idp-could-replace-platform-engineering/ below:

Google's Cloud IDP Could Replace Platform Engineering

Google Cloud has unveiled a new Internal Development Platform (IDP) that could fundamentally reshape how software is built, potentially making traditional platform engineering obsolete by shifting development responsibilities from individual developers to integrated cloud services.

Platform engineering makes business application building easier by providing curated, tested, proven and helpful development tools for software engineers so they can build their projects for their companies. With platform engineering, developers can leave behind the old ways of spending valuable time maintaining and finding their own tools and instead focus on providing business value for their employers.

But what if there was an even easier and better way to build software than using today’s platform engineering approach?

And what if Google, a powerhouse of IT engineering and application building, could do it using the huge capabilities of Google Cloud and its development might in a new way that could transcend today’s platform engineering methods?

That is just what Google Cloud experts have been talking about in recent months as they unveiled the fledgling creation of a Google Cloud IDP that could be the most effective and practical way to build the applications of the future.

In a recent post on his personal blog, Richard Seroter, the chief evangelist at Google Cloud, wrote that Google might have discovered this better way by “taking the best parts of platform engineering — consistent config management, infrastructure orchestration, environment management, deployment services, and role-based access — and deliver them as a vertically-integrated experience” instead of as a traditional platform.

The Google Cloud advancement that sparked Seroter’s interest came at the recent Google Cloud Next ’25 event, where the company unveiled its concept of what a Google Cloud IDP could be and how it would work.

“Can we shift down instead of putting so much responsibility on the developer?” he wrote in an April 16 post on his Richard Seroter’s Architectural Musings blog. “I think we can. We have to! Our goal at Google Cloud is to deliver a Cloud IDP that is complete, integrated, and application centric. The cloud has typically been a pile of infrastructure services, loosely organized through tags or other flawed grouping mechanisms. We’re long overdue for an app-centric lens on the cloud.”

Google recently put the tools that enable this future into public preview with its new Application Design Center (ADC), which offers functionality for creating templates, storing templates in catalogs, sharing templates and deploying instances of templates, he wrote.

“I’m a believer in platform engineering as a concept,” wrote Seroter. “Bringing standardization and golden paths to developers so that they can ship software quickly and safely sounds awesome. And it is. But it’s also been a slog to land it. Measurement has been inconsistent, devs are wildly unhappy with the state of self-service, and the tech landscape is disjointed with tons of tools and a high cost of integration. Smart teams are finding success, but this should be easier. Maybe now it is.”

Using the ADC, users of the IDP are empowered to define their application building systems from a series of components that can include a wide range of Google services, including Compute Engine, serverless, databases and more, Seroter told The New Stack in an interview. Users can build their services by combining them in the ADC, instead of having to individually go to each service, deploy the necessary bits and then stitch them together, he said.

“All of this should be self-service,” explained Seroter. “None of this should be that you have to hire our expensive consultants to do it. The whole point of this is ‘let’s make platform engineering for normal people.’”

Seroter emphasized, though, that at this point the Google Cloud IDP is not a finished product, and it is not something that customers can buy using a SKU number today.

“Everything I am talking about here is actually available in either public preview or GA … to customers [through the ADC], which is exciting,” he said. “Will we turn that into a single button to click and light up the whole thing? Maybe in the future, but for now, these are components that all fit together under that bucket.”

At the Cloud Next ’25 event, where these ideas were first revealed, the topic of the IDP “blew up” with attendees and potential users in a big way, he said.

“I got tackled by someone who is a service provider after a breakout talk … and I am still getting tackled on this after the event,” said Seroter. One attendee told him, “I think you just solved platform engineering,” he added.

The excitement about the IDP is palpable in the community, according to Seroter. “If a majority of Google Cloud customers are not doing this with us in 12 to 18 months, then we have done it wrong. This should be the best way to do an app-centric cloud environment that you can manage at scale, that you can buy in the cloud. So that is the aspiration, that we are changing how you operate in the cloud.”

A key factor in the IDP approach is that users can scale their application-building requirements by assembling smart, integrated services, rather than through traditional platforms where code is built on them, he said. “[Here you] do not make platform engineering the focus. You make the developers the focus. You make the customer the focus.”

Much of the work behind the Google Cloud IDP comes from Anna Berenberg, an engineering fellow with Google Cloud who has been with the company for 19 years.

“She is the originator of a lot of these concepts overall … many of these ideas which I did not really understand the impact of until I saw it manifest itself,” said Seroter. “She had this vision that I did not even buy into three years ago. She saw a little further ahead from there, and she has built and published things. It is impressive to have such interesting engineering thought leadership, not just applied to how Google does platforms, but now turning that into how we can change … infrastructure to make it simpler. She is a pioneer of that.”

In an interview with The New Stack, Berenberg said that her ideas on the IDP came to her when she looked at how this could all work using Google’s vast compute and services resources to reimagine how platform engineering could be improved.

“The way it works is you have a cloud platform, and then on top of it is this thick layer of platform engineering stuff, right?” said Berenberg. “So, platform engineering teams are building a layer on top of infrastructure cloud to do an abstraction and workflows and whatever they need” to improve processes for developers. “It shrinks down because everything shifts down to the platform and now we are providing platform engineering. “

The Google IDP brings these new abstractions of applications, workloads and services together with all their associated resources to bring applications together using the power of the cloud infrastructure, she said.

“We can do it because we can permeate that through the platform, through everything and everybody, vertically and horizontally, while [other platform engineering vendors] only can build on top,” said Berenberg. “They have no way of building into the platform. That is a difference that we are trying to solve and that is why it is going to take some time.”

The two biggest takeaways for the Google IDP project today, according to Seroter, are how it can potentially make platform engineering easier in the future, as well as how it can become the first app-centric, cloud hyperscale tool for better software development.

“I think that hopefully we are done the period of doing platform engineering the hard way, like we finished that stage,” he said. “Are we nearing the end of the hard way? I think that the answer is yes, and if IDP finally ushers in the cloud IDP concept, the reason this will have come from Google is because people like Anna Berenberg live in our platforms.”

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