This article was originally published on The New Stack.
The messy world of software development often causes headaches and frustration among developers, who have to navigate through intricate layers but don’t have adequate tools to find, centralize and govern their assets.
Such complexity produces slower workflows, redundancies and lack of visibility into the ownership of specific software and data assets, resulting in higher costs and slower market entry.
Internal developer platforms (IDPs) have paved the way for a more mature, organized and standardized way of developing. Even better since composability entered the platform archetype, making platforms act like comprehensive ecosystems with self-service tools, services, data and documentation.
The platform marketplace is a fundamental component of IDPs: It’s a catalog of modules, mainly applications and bundles of microservices, that enhances application development by stimulating the discovery, creation and reuse of software resources like code and libraries.
What is a Platform Marketplace?
The platform marketplace is a curated showcase of pre-built, runtime components to streamline and improve developer workflows. Starting from fixed rules, developers can use these ready-to-use components by adhering to standards imposed by platform engineers.
There’s a difference between a platform marketplace and other types of catalogs.
Platform Marketplace, Software Catalog, Data Catalog: Are They Synonyms?
While developer platforms have evolved significantly, they remain unclear to many. Let’s have a look at the different types of catalogs.
Software Catalog
In most cases, a software catalog is an internal list of software components, APIs, services and metadata used within an organization. It’s a key part of an internal developer portal to store information, track resources and facilitate the discovery of internal assets for development purposes. It is a single source of truth of all the software infrastructure and provides useful insights into the software ownership and technical details.
Data Catalog
Similarly, a data catalog is a centralized inventory of data assets and related metadata to address data discovery, data governance, data readiness, data policies and compliance, mitigating user adoption concerns. Both software and data catalog are trusted censuses of all software and data assets within an organization. But they also represent a guidebook of contextual knowledge to drive AI models across the whole ecosystem, assuring they return valuable and relevant answers and operate within predetermined boundaries.
Platform Marketplace
A platform marketplace has similar characteristics but different scope. The primary focus of the marketplace is speeding up the creation of new applications with reuse and composition. It serves as a comprehensive scaffolding of ready-made applications, providing a self-service library of reusable components and modules, namely templates, plugins and cloud resources.
In essence, while a software catalog is like a technical registry of internal assets for discoverability, tracking and versioning purposes, the marketplace pursues the rapid consumption and composability of those very resources.
The difference is very subtle, since they are similar and could easily overlap. Typically, platform engineers use software catalogs, data engineers work with data catalogs, and software developers and engineers rely on platform marketplaces.
Platform Marketplace: The Self-Service Display for Composability
The marketplace aims at faster discoverability and quick consumption of items that directly contribute to building new digital products, fostering composability and reuse.
The marketplace actively serves as the visible layer and central hub where developers discover and consume reusable components and assets, such as those listed in the software and data catalogs.
It is the user-facing interface and curated showcase that allows the discoverability and self-service instantiation of components. In short, it’s the very mechanism through which the assets from the software catalog become easily accessible and actionable for developers.
Platform Marketplace: Main Components
You can easily mix and match your own components with existing ones to accelerate development:
- Templates: Ready-to-use code or configurations for automating the creation of new components or environments following defined practices.
- Examples: Demonstrations or starter kits showcasing best practices for microservices development.
- Proxies: Existing microservices used for communication within the platform.
- Plugins: Existing Docker images or code to add specific functionalities, extend capabilities or integrate with external tools.
- Applications: Bundles of resources designed to create applications quickly in a few clicks.
- Infrastructure resources: Custom objects, definable as code, that extend platform capabilities, such as databases or cloud services.
- Application programming interfaces (APIs): Interfaces for accessing data or invoking services, often available for discovery and use through the marketplace or associated portals.
Take the marketplace as an accessible playground, where you can discover and reuse all existing modules or create new ones and make them available for future consumption according to specific business requirements and runtime needs.
Platform Marketplace: Typical Capabilities
The marketplace becomes a fundamental piece of the larger puzzle that enables composable platforms and, as a result, composable enterprises.
Typically, a platform marketplace facilitates developers with:
- Resource discoverability: Developers can easily find and access available components, services, APIs and data, both proprietary and external ones. Advanced search capabilities, categorization and filtering make the whole process a breeze.
- Composability and reuse: Business functions and processes, tech components, architectural patterns, applications templating, industry specific items. All these components can be combined and reused to accelerate development and create new applications in self-service fashion.
- Resource versioning: The marketplace manages multiple versions of resources to support structured life cycle management and smooth upgrades.
- Contribution management: The marketplace is a showcase of modules, which encourages the addition and curation of components created by internal teams or external partners and vendors.
- Usage analytics: The marketplace also provides tracking and optimizing capabilities, supporting usage metrics and monitoring on platform and resource consumption.
Platform Marketplace: What are the Benefits?
Platform curators set predefined standards to which developers must adhere. The standardization and centralization of components and pipelines favours a streamlined development process and returns remarkable value to the business itself.
The most tangible benefits of a platform marketplace are:
- Time to market: Composable approaches assure flexibility and scalability. An extensive marketplace helps produce a streamlined development workflow and, as a result, a sped up time to market.
- Business agility: The marketplace is a large digital library of reusable, ready-made components and services. With plenty of choice, users within organizations can use modules and modify them in a timely manner for business agility and better alignment with fast-changing goals.
- Compliance: Ready-to-code templates and guardrails set by engineers shape paved roads for developers, who don’t need to focus on compliance and can create or edit software according to their needs. Developers know every component is selected, curated and maintained so that it is compliance-friendly.
- Consistency: Developers can choose among pre-approved and standardized services, meaning they can rely on high quality, secure code.
- Services integration: Existing services and new ones are seamlessly integrated throughout the catalog and become available for every team within the organization. Consequently, different teams can discover components that are reusable for diverse sectors and aims.
- Tech debt reduction: Composability enables a low-code/no-code approach that eventually reduces the toolchain complexity. A nourished marketplace of building blocks helps reduce both the cognitive load and technical debt.
Summarizing
Composability has amplified developer platforms capabilities and enabled developers to experiment with modules at will.
The platform marketplace, a key component of internal developer platforms, provides developers with a digital display of reusable items: from templates to applications, possibilities are numerous and developers can operate them just by adhering to the rules imposed by engineers. As curated elements, they allow developers to focus on building quality applications without worrying too much about compliance and consistency.
The marketplace is the most visible layer of components taken from the software catalog, enabling immediate discoverability and easy consumption of reusable components that facilitate services integration and business agility that unlocks responsiveness and faster market entry.
Would you like to simplify your workflows? Choose to integrate a marketplace into your platform and get access to a huge self-service library of reusable resources.
