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Teleportation is cool. Although it’s been around since Star Trek was on our television screens and has since been the key premise is Stargate, the Incredibles 2 and possibly Bill & Ted’s time machine, the ability to step into one place and find yourself in another (often wider expanse) has always captured our imagination. But if the use of portals has ever actually come down to Earth, it has been as a term we use to describe a doorway to digital resources where the term website, information pool or database simply wouldn’t do.
Today we commonly talk about portals as a source of user information designed to serve a specific interest or need such as we might require for Human Resources (HR), personal tax regulations or perhaps medical information channels, automotive specs or even video gaming.
Developers love portals
If one group of individuals is known for its embrace, adoption and reliance upon portals in the course of their daily lives it is software application development engineers. Given the expanse of programming portals that exist (with the most famous arguably being Stack Overflow), how should we think about these information channels in terms of functionality, what makes a good portal and where will these technologies develop next?
A specialist in this space is the very logically named Port - an open internal developer portal, owned by platform engineering teams and built for developers. Aiming to consolidate everything developers need to know and execute to deliver software autonomously and to comply with organizational standards, the organization runs a ‘state of the internal developer portals’ analysis to assess how these software and data science engineering resources are being used in the workplace today.
Port says that 2023 was, in many ways, the year of platform engineering, with internal developer portals recognized in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2023. Companies began defining and hiring developer experience roles tasked with setting up a portal to drive developer productivity and even increase happiness.
“Despite this massive wave of adoption, the market seems to be in its initial stages, seeking to define the value of platforms and portals and determine what they’re made of and what they can offer,” notes Port chief marketing officer Roni Floman. “That’s why [want to] assess how the market sees internal developer portals and possibly show ways in which the market can evolve, as well as understand critical pains [points] and drivers for change in a world where developer productivity is a prominent issue.”
To analyze the market, Port questioned full-time employees from the US and Western Europe (Germany, France, UK, Netherlands) working in companies with 150 or more developers. Respondents included platform engineers, developer experience professionals, platform product managers and site reliability engineers. The sample represented companies utilizing a microservice architecture in production within the engineering department.
The rise of platform engineering
“An overwhelming majority of companies see the importance of internal developer portals and are using or implementing them,” says Port’s Floman. “Almost 85% of respondents surveyed have either started implementing internal developer portals or are planning to do so in the next year. Virtually all (99%) report that they have begun using platform engineering in their organizations, with 53% reporting that they’ve begun in the past year. This implies that companies are dedicated to incorporating portals as a fundamental aspect of their commitment to platform engineering.
When asked what type of internal developer portal companies use, an amazing 35% reported using spreadsheets with microservice data. However, using spreadsheets should not considered a true internal developer portal given its highly manual nature and the absence of developer self-service capabilities. 53% utilize various forms of developer portals, including in-house, backstage, and commercial products. Notably, smaller companies tend to have self-service interfaces that aren’t portals, while large companies are more likely to use in-house portals.
Floman and the Port team state that virtually every organization has initiated some form of platform engineering, with [most] incorporating GitOps into their approach, while the remaining organizations are on the verge of adopting it. When asked about the daily time developers spend on non-core tasks due to the absence of platform engineering, a staggering 70% revealed that developers spend three to four hours each day on such activities. Additionally, for 68% of respondents, the average lead time to deploy software to production is several weeks or even months.
The promise of productivity
Most companies working with this kind of technology resource define a successful portal as one that improves developer productivity. But that’s a strange metric in some ways. Why? Because it’s one of those terms that just ‘gets used’ too much, perhaps because it sounds proactive and positive, or perhaps because it just feels right. In reality, many organizations that talk about this subject use surveys or custom reporting to measure developer productivity, instead of recognized frameworks such as SPACE (satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, efficiency) or DORA (DevOps Research & Assessment).
If the use of portals in software engineering teams can teach us anything, it may be that these essentially digitally focused workers need exemplary digital support resources to do their job, so what works well in programming in development (in terms or style, structure and substance - if not subject matter, which obviously needs to change on based upon the workplace role it serves) should work well for the rest of us.
Portals matter, beam us up.
