As organizations adopt cloud-native development practices, the need for consistent, scalable internal developer platforms (IDPs) continues to grow. Cloud-native environments often lead to distributed systems, fragmented pipelines, and complex toolchains—making it harder for teams to onboard developers quickly, enforce standards, or maintain delivery velocity.
According to Gartner, “developer self-service has an inherent benefit to bringing consistency and repeatability to otherwise disparate processes and error prone manual handoffs.” Forrester research echoes this urgency: in a commissioned study, 87% of DevOps leaders reported prioritizing developer productivity and experience. Among those who invested in Developer Experience (DevEx), 74% saw increased productivity, 77% improved release speed, and 85% a positive impact on revenue growth.
Red Hat Developer Hub (RHDH) was built to address these challenges. Based on the open-source Backstage project, RHDH gives developers a self-service portal with unified access to tools, templates, and documentation. However, visibility into delivery pipelines—CI, testing, and deployments—often remains disconnected.
To bridge this visibility gap, IBM DevOps Automation brings delivery insights to the IDP by embedding lightweight plugins into RHDH so teams can surface build results, test outcomes, and deployment status directly in the developer portal. Together, these technologies improve both productivity and transparency—without compromising control.
Business Value
Before integrating delivery context into the developer portal, developers often spend time jumping between build tools, test reports, and deployment dashboards. This fragmentation disrupts focus, delays issue resolution, and slows down the entire development cycle.
Together, Red Hat Developer Hub and IBM DevOps Automation create a unified developer experience. Developers stay in flow with visibility into the most relevant CI/CD data—right where they work. Build health, test coverage, and deployment progress are accessible from the RHDH component view, while pipelines remain securely governed through IBM DevOps Automation.
The result is fewer handoffs, faster resolution times, and more autonomy for developers, all without sacrificing standardization or compliance.
Technical Value
IBM DevOps Build, Test, and Deploy plugins bring read-only visibility into CI/CD pipelines, embedded directly within RHDH. These integrations use component labels from the RHDH software catalog to map insights from IBM DevOps Automation back to the correct services.
Together, these plugins surface key information across the delivery pipeline:
- DevOps Build Plugin
Surfaces recent job status, failure trends, and change history, allowing developers to quickly confirm build success or drill into issues without tool-switching.
- DevOps Test Plugin
Provides insights into automated testing across the SDLC—including API, UI, performance, and security tests—with failure summaries and coverage data integrated in context.
- DevOps Deploy Plugin
Displays current and historical deployment status across dev, test, and production environments—so teams can confirm where their services are running and monitor rollout progress in real time.
Together, these capabilities bring delivery visibility into the place developers already work—helping them move faster with fewer delays and less noise.
Challenges Addressed
In modern DevOps environments, delivery pipelines span multiple tools and teams. Without a unified portal, developers waste time chasing down build failures or waiting for release status updates. This slows down delivery and increases the risk of miscommunication.
By embedding IBM DevOps Automation into RHDH, teams solve this challenge by offering developers a centralized view into delivery status—from builds to production. Developers no longer need to ask where their code is or whether a test passed; they can see it themselves.
At the same time, platform engineers retain control over CI/CD implementation. Pipelines are defined and governed in IBM DevOps Automation, while the plugins expose only the right level of visibility—maintaining security and audit integrity across teams.
Real-World Example
One global financial services firm adopted RHDH as their unified developer portal to improve onboarding and streamline delivery. Before the IBM DevOps Automation integration, developers routinely navigated across CI tools, test dashboards, and deployment logs just to track the status of a single change.
After embedding the IBM DevOps Build, Test, and Deploy plugins, developers could monitor the lifecycle of their services from one place. Build failures were spotted immediately. Deployment progress could be tracked visually. And issues were resolved in hours instead of days—all without additional overhead for the platform team.
Together, IBM DevOps Automation and Red Hat Developer Hub transformed their developer experience—bringing focus, clarity, and speed to software delivery.
Best Practices
To get the most from IBM DevOps Automation and RHDH:
- Tag components consistently in the RHDH software catalog to ensure accurate mapping between services and delivery data.
- Standardize pipeline patterns in DevOps Build, Test, and Deploy to simplify integration and enforcement.
- Promote RHDH adoption as the central interface for delivery insight. Even read-only data eliminates time-consuming tool-switching.
- Extend visibility over time, including integrations with IBM DevOps Loop to support intelligent gates, value stream mapping, and predictive insights.
Conclusion
IBM DevOps Automation and Red Hat Developer Hub combine to deliver a streamlined, developer-first experience backed by enterprise-grade delivery governance. Developers gain on-demand access to the CI/CD information they need. Platform teams maintain consistency and control. And the organization benefits from faster releases, better collaboration, and improved delivery outcomes.
Together, these tools create a more scalable, intelligent DevOps platform—one that empowers developers while reducing complexity.
Ready to get started?
Learn how to install IBM DevOps Automation plugins for Red Hat Developer Hub in this step-by-step guide.
Request a live demo to see how IBM DevOps plugins inside RHDH can transform your internal developer platform.
Sources:
Gartner, Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals, 2022
Forrester, The Developer Experience Opportunity Snapshot, 2023 (commissioned by Humanitec)