Internal platform for development and developers: what does a business pay for?

Interesting. report from Alexander Chubinsky on the creation and development of IDP (internal developer platform) The example of Yandex. Alexander tells the story of the development of the platform at Yandex and outlines the stages through which IDP passed: feudalism, empire, decentralization, capitalism. The first three stages are interesting from the point of view of history, but the stage of capitalism is relevant for everyone. And at this point, Alexander says the following.

• CTO is relevant to the issue of the cost of the platform (TCO - total cost of ownership)At the previous stages, the reliability and quality of the services provided were discussed.
• CFO cares about P&L. (profit and loss) product – and the cost of platform services can be a significant part of this report for a particular product This is where the charging system comes in. (exactly) The answer is that money should be taken for the services consumed by users. Next, we need to calculate the unit economy for the platform - the platform is not for making money on internal users, but rather should be self-sustaining.
• Then there is a desire to be able to do zoom-in / zoom-out to analyze the consumption of platform resources - in the context of services / commands / products. But the question arises: what are the growth drivers of the platforms – there are two of them: resource consumption, team growth. Resource consumption is tied to unit economy and accounting of consumption, but the team of the platform grows in some proportion to consumers. (conditionally some % of product teams - this is due to the fact that customers of new features are becoming more and in order to meet this demand requires more people.) Next, Alexander talks about the fact that the platform becomes an internal business unit and can go outside and sell some of its services outdoors.

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