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06. What's a Cloud Native IDP?

Platform engineers must develop their IDPs quickly, because developers can't deliver apps until the IDP is ready.

Platform Engineers Must Develop Their IDPs Quickly

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Building an IDP from scratch takes a team of platform engineers several years, so almost all Platform Engineers leverage open-source software (OSS) tools. 


Many open-source software (OSS) tools have been proven to work at large software successful organizations, like Google, Intuit, Netflix and others.  Therefore, it is a reasonable assumption that the OSS tools will meet the platform engineers needs.


The #1 source of open source tools for the cloud is the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) with over 150 OSS projects.  However, it is estimated that there are over 50 million OSS projects globally, so the CNCF is certainly not the only source.  


Why are there so many OSS tools?  Isn’t there one OSS tool that a platform engineer can just download and use as an IDP? 


The answer is no, an IDP requires a collection of integrated OSS tools.  The reason is a time-tested software development principle called ‘modularity.’  Modularity is the concept of building a small program that does just one thing very well, and can be leveraged, like a building block, in many other projects. 

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