Resources

OpenShift Day 5 Guide

Platform Engineering — Internal Developer Platforms, Golden Paths, and Workflow Automation.

Internal Developer Platform

Day 5 is about building the platform for your developers on top of OpenShift. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) abstracts cluster complexity so application teams can focus on code, not infrastructure.

Red Hat Developer Hub (Backstage)

Red Hat Developer Hub is the supported distribution of Backstage — a developer portal that unifies service catalogs, documentation, scaffolding templates, and CI/CD visibility in one place.

Software Catalog

Tracks every service, API, library, and resource across the org. Owned-by relationships, tech docs, and health dashboards in one view.

Scaffolder Templates

Self-service app creation from approved templates. Developers get a repo, pipeline, namespace, and monitoring configured automatically in minutes.

TechDocs

Docs-as-code: Markdown in Git rendered in the portal. Eliminates scattered Confluence pages and stale PDFs.

apiVersion: rhdh.redhat.com/v1alpha1
kind: Backstage
metadata:
  name: developer-hub
  namespace: rhdh-operator
spec:
  application:
    appConfig:
      configMaps:
      - name: app-config-rhdh
    dynamicPluginsConfigMapName: dynamic-plugins-rhdh
    extraEnvs:
      secrets:
      - name: rhdh-secrets
    replicas: 2
    route:
      enabled: true
  database:
    enableLocalDb: true

Platform Maturity Model

Level	Name	What developers experience	Platform team focus
1	Provisioned	Cluster exists, raw kubectl access	Stability, RBAC, networking
2	Managed	Namespaces, quotas, SCCs configured	Standardization, security
3	Automated	GitOps pipelines, CI templates available	Golden paths, self-service
4	Self-service	One-click app creation via IDP	Developer experience, metrics
5	Cognitive	Platform anticipates needs, auto-remediates	AIOps, policy-as-code

Platform Team as a Product Team

The platform team's customers are internal developers. Measure success with DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore. A platform that improves these numbers has earned its budget.

This guide reflects OpenShift 4.x / Kubernetes 1.28+. Examples are illustrative — adjust for your environment and toolchain.