Internal Developer Platform

The word that does the work is self-service. A platform team that provisions environments on request has built a service desk with better tooling; a platform provides a capability the consuming team invokes on its own, at the moment it needs it, with no human in the path.

The second word is curated. A platform is a set of opinionated defaults over a much larger space of possibilities — one blessed way to deploy a service, one way to get a database, one way to emit telemetry — and the value comes precisely from the options it removes. A platform that exposes every knob of the underlying cloud has moved complexity rather than reduced it.

The test of whether one exists: how long from a new team wanting a production-ready service to having one, with pipeline, telemetry, alerting, secrets and network policy already correct. Days is a platform. Weeks is a wiki page.