AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Building a developer portal with Port on AWS to Boost Engineering Efficiency
By Ioannis Moustakis, Sr Solutions Architect – AWS
By Nikita Ravi Shetty, Associate Specialist Solutions Architect – AWS
By Zohar Einy, CEO – Port
By Matar Peles, Solutions Engineer – Port
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Ship more, ship it faster – and don’t burn out your engineers along the way. Software engineering organizations are increasingly looking for ways to balance these critical priorities. To do so, developers need one powerful hub—a single platform that puts every tool and resource at their fingertips while keeping innovation flowing at full speed. This is where the concept of a developer portal comes into play, offering a solution that addresses these points and drives improvements in developer productivity.
As an AWS Partner, Port‘s platform enables the creation of internal developer portals, unifying a customer’s unique tool collections, easing cognitive burden on developers, and guiding them along golden paths. Port’s software catalog covers microservices, resources, APIs, and custom assets plus the organization standards that guide a company’s ways of working. Together, these provide a centralized platform to support developer self-service, workflow automation, and agentic AI capabilities.
In this blog, we examine why a developer platform is needed to increase developer productivity and how you can streamline building your internal developer portal for your AWS infrastructure with Port.
The challenge of improving developer productivity
As organizations grow to tens, hundreds, or thousands of developers, the complexity of software, systems, and organizational structures increases, ultimately leading to a drop in developer productivity. To provide developers with platforms and processes that enable them to be productive, companies need to invest time and engineering effort strategically. However, enhancing developer productivity at scale comes with its own set of challenges.
Fragmentation of developer tools and resources
One of the primary challenges to developer productivity is fragmented tools and resources across various platforms. Often developers change systems, fight to find what they need, and waste valuable time. This fragmentation not only slows down development cycles but also increases the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies in the development process.
Inefficient developer onboarding
Many organizations lack a streamlined onboarding process, resulting in prolonged ramp-up times for new team members. Without a centralized hub of information and resources, new developers struggle to understand project architectures, coding standards, and best practices specific to their organization.
Lack of standardization and compliance
Without a unified platform, ensuring consistency in development practices and adherence to compliance standards becomes a challenge. This can lead to variations in code quality, security vulnerabilities, and difficulties in maintaining and scaling applications.
Complexity in setting up developer portals
Many organizations lack the expertise or resources to build and maintain a comprehensive developer portal from scratch. This complexity often results in either suboptimal solutions or the decision to avoid developer portal implementations, missing out on productivity gains.
How a developer portal can help with developer velocity and efficiency
Organizations need to build golden paths, which are a set of well-defined practices and workflows that guide developers in managing, developing, and deploying software. Let’s look at some common characteristics and benefits of such successful setups.
Improved developer experience drives engagement
A comprehensive developer portal provides a user-friendly interface that centralizes all necessary tools, documentation, and resources in one place, developers can focus more on writing code and solving problems rather than navigating complex systems.
With advances in AI agents and protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), developers can now interact with systems in a natural way, through their preferred tools , and developer portals need to support and enhance these interactions. For example, by leveraging Amazon Q Developer CLI, developers can connect to the Port MCP server and interact with their developer portal and catalog of services directly from their command line. For example, Figure 1 shows how leveraging Amazon Q Developer CLI, developers can connect to the Port MCP server and interact with their developer portal and catalog of services directly from their command line.
Figure 1: Amazon Q Developer CLI to communicate with Port MCP
Standardization reduces cognitive load
By centralizing documentation, best practices, and development standards, a developer portal helps reduce the cognitive load on developers. This standardization ensures that all team members are working from the same playbook, minimizing errors and inconsistencies that can arise from varied practices. It also facilitates easier collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams, as everyone has access to the same set of resources and guidelines.
Self-Service capabilities eliminate bottlenecks
A well-designed developer portal provides self-service capabilities that empower developers to access the resources they need without relying on other teams. This autonomy reduces bottlenecks in the development process, allowing developers to quickly provision environments, access APIs, and use necessary tools without waiting for approvals or assistance from operations teams.
Measurable performance improvements
Implementing a developer portal allows organizations to track and measure various performance metrics, both quantitative and qualitative. On the quantitative side, metrics such as deployment frequency, error rates, and time to resolution can be monitored and analyzed to track progress. These metrics provide concrete evidence of productivity improvements over time.
Equally important are the qualitative insights gained through developer surveys and feedback. These softer metrics often reveal pain points and bottlenecks that may not be immediately apparent in the quantitative data. By regularly asking for feedback and acting on it, organizations can continuously refine their developer portal and related processes, leading to ongoing improvements in efficiency and satisfaction.
Build your internal developer portal for AWS quickly with Port
Port’s flexible approach integrates seamlessly with AWS services to create a centralized hub for developers. Key topics include streamlining developer workflows, a flexible software catalog, and self-service actions that enable teams to automate common tasks and reducing developer cognitive load. Figure 2 shows how developers can submit cloud resource action using Self-service hub which triggers provisioning process in your AWS infrastructure.
Figure 2: Port integrates with AWS
Port’s out-of-the-box integration with AWS services allow for quick population of the software catalog. Any resources supported by the AWS Cloud Control API can be added to the software catalog in Port. Figure 3 shows Port’s cloud resource catalog, a simplified view to manage AWS resources of your infrastructure.
Figure 3: Port provides a central catalog view of resources, and processes
Most often, customers include the cloud infrastructure related to deployed applications, AWS accounts, and developer resources. However, Port offers extensive customization options to tailor the portal to specific organizational needs. The catalog is maintained dynamically so that it’s always up to date, enabling software teams, cloud teams and others to have a shared source of truth about application ownership and status. Figure 4 shows Software catalog enables developers to gain thorough understanding of their cloud infrastructure.
Figure 4: Port’s software catalog
Port also includes the software standards, so teams know if their apps meet all the organizational requirements for code, security, or AWS best practices. Like the catalog, standards measurements are updated automatically to keep them fresh. Combining the catalog, standards, and dynamic access controls, Port also provides a control plane for automations and self-service actions. If a developer needs a test environment, they can create it themselves according to a golden path.
Using Port with AWS, organizations can rapidly deploy a developer portal that enhances productivity, standardizes processes, and provides a unified interface for managing cloud resources. This solution empowers teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
Checkmarx improvements by using Port
Before Port, Checkmarx faced significant challenges with developer environments, including a bottleneck of tickets for DevOps assistance, five different approaches to environment creation, and wasted expenditure on environments that continued to run long after their need had passed. This led to frustration for both developers and DevOps. Noam Brendel, DevOps team lead at Checkmarx said: “Up until now, if a developer wanted to create a new service, they were dependent on a lot of other teams, who they had to approach to get this done. We had a few templates but nothing concrete or well-organized.”
Figure 5: Checkmarx Customer Case Study
Checkmarx now uses Port to provide an end-to-end resource self-service experience for creating and destroying developer environments. This ensured developers followed “golden paths” with built-in security and compliance software standards, leading to standardized and consistent environments.
“If a developer needs a development environment, they simply go to Port and click ‘create’…there’s a whole black box of logic that isn’t exposed to the user”, he added.
Conclusion
By using Port on AWS infrastructure, organizations can create a robust developer portal that addresses the challenges of improving developer productivity head-on. Such a portal not only centralizes resources and standardizes processes but also provides the flexibility to adapt to the unique needs of each development team. This results in faster, higher-quality software by creating an efficient, engaged, and productive development team.
Call to Action: Book a Demo with Port.
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Port – AWS Partner Spotlight
Port is about creating compelling developer experiences and delivering them in a portal, using the building blocks you need, according to your stack, developer personas and culture.