South Korean IT companies are building and upgrading internal developer platforms (IDPs) to boost development productivity. The key is to standardise repetitive infrastructure work such as server configuration, deployment and access management through a platform, so developers can focus only on service development.

As of June 2, industry officials cite Yanolja, Viva Republica and Daangn as representative companies moving to adopt IDPs. They operate their own platforms that integrate and standardise in-house development environments.

An IDP is an internal platform that supports a self-service approach, allowing developers to use the development environments and infrastructure they need. It integrates services such as server creation, app deployment, monitoring, access management and technical documentation, helping developers focus on service development rather than running infrastructure.

Travel tech firm Yanolja recently built its own IDP. It aims to raise service stability and operational efficiency by upgrading its development environment. The travel industry must process real-time inventory and price information at home and abroad while linking various suppliers and sales channels such as airlines and accommodation. The company strategy is to reduce rising developer fatigue caused by complex development environments through development infrastructure automation. It is also providing internal developers with AI tools by integrating agents based on AWS Bedrock into the IDP, reflecting the spread of AI coding tools.

A Yanolja official said the travel industry has a high level of complexity in development environments because various suppliers, sales channels and systems are organically connected. The official said the IDP reduces the burden of developers managing infrastructure one by one, lowers developers' cognitive load and helps them focus on more core development work.

Toss operator Viva Republica implemented an IDP through its in-house development and management platform, Internal. Both developers and non-developers use the platform. Internal enables development and deployment in the same way for everything from internal systems to customer-facing services. There is also no distinction among affiliates such as Toss Bank, Toss Securities and Toss Payments. An Internal Platform Team is responsible for building and operating the platform.

One example is a data-integrated management admin platform. Given Toss is made up of hundreds of microservices, there was the inconvenience of having to develop a separate data management screen for each service. It addressed this with a platform that automatically generates a management screen by entering only server settings. The platform also handles authorisation, authentication and security processing. Recently, it has focused on providing an environment where employees can safely test and verify AI and AI agents. It also built an AI-based automated monitoring system.

A Viva Republica official said the Internal Platform Team supports service organisations so they can focus on service development itself rather than repetitive infrastructure work. The official said it is improving development productivity and work efficiency by developing internal tools to a product level rather than a simple back-office system.

Daangn's Common Service Development Team is leading IDP development and operations. The key is integrating common technical functions that had been scattered by service, such as second-hand trading, neighbourhood community and Daangn Alba, into one platform and providing them to companywide developers. It also prepared technology to respond to increased traffic as service regions and types expand.

A Daangn official said it was largely judged inefficient for each team to develop common functions separately by team. The official said the role is to help each team's developers do their main work.

The industry expects the need for IDPs to rise as service scale grows. The explanation is that as infrastructure complexity rapidly increases, individual developers find it difficult to handle it, and IDPs are a way to raise development productivity without adding staff. IT market research firm Gartner forecast that by 2026, 80 percent of large software organisations will operate dedicated platform engineering organisations. That is up from 45 percent in 2022.

An IT industry official said platform companies' development competitiveness is changing from how many developers they have to whether they can provide an environment where developers can work quickly and stably. The official said IDPs are the clearest example of that shift.