Accelerating Platform Adoption with Developer Trust

Engineering leaders everywhere are investing in internal development platforms (IDPs). The appeal is compelling: Create opinionated, standardized, secure, and consistent ways for developers to build and ship software, and they’ll spend more of their time building and less time worrying about implementation details or compliance policies.

Gartner coined the term “shift down” to describe this evolution; one that looks to abstract the complexities of cloud-native environments away from the builders themselves and let Platform teams shoulder the load, all while making developer productivity itself the Platform team’s ultimate KPI. While shifting down should result in less risk for an organization through secure foundations, it’s primarily about driving engineering velocity, which should come via developer productivity and through fewer production failures and rollbacks that cost site reliability team time and resources.

The trend has caught on and become nearly ubiquitous: 2025’s DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development report found that 90% of organizations reported leveraging a developer platform. But just establishing a dedicated team hoping that if they “build it, developers will come,” isn’t enough. That’s because without creating paved paths that map to developer needs, adoption will lag.

Where platforms fail developers

Platform teams need to strike a balance between developer flexibility and standardized governance, a task that is already challenging in itself. Add internal resource limitations to the mix, and often the result is fewer paved paths designed to solve dev use cases with a “one size fits most” approach. As foundational templates, these paved paths rely on container images to provide developers with a base to build upon, with Platform teams frequently finding themselves trying to curate and maintain a set of base images for each paved path. Rather than meeting a broad set of needs, these “golden images” often fall short of everyone’s use cases.

That happens for a few different reasons:

• Limited language and version coverage: Standardized images for Python or Node are helpful, but what about Rust, Erlang, or Clojure? Developers working outside the mainstream are often left out, and those working on older or newer versions may find that internal development platforms can’t accommodate the range, despite what’s supported upstream.

• Slow updates: When curated images lag behind upstream OSS patches, it can create issues. That could be due to a lack of CVE patching, causing builds to fail scans, or it could result in new or critical features not being available.

• Poor ergonomics: Without clear documentation, scaffolding, and evangelism, developers struggle to onboard. Frustration drives developers back to their own workflows.

• Lack of feedback loops: Developers can’t easily influence or request changes to the platform, causing adoption to suffer.

The result is predictable: developers, like water, find the path of least resistance. Platform teams may try to channel them one way, but if the system feels slow or incomplete, they’ll flow around it. After all, their primary goal is shipping code, not adhering to paved paths to do it.

In response, many organizations double down on structure, treating platforms like products to be enforced, rather than experiences to be adopted. Guardrails turn into gates. Centralization slows down updates instead of speeding them up, and instead of increasing adoption, these efforts can erode developer trust and push teams further away from the platform.

Ultimately, Platform teams and developers share a common goal of achieving speed and development velocity. In a world where developers see the platform as the easiest and expedient path forward, adoption will increase. When that’s not the case, adoption and standardization will falter.

How Chainguard makes adoption the easy choice

At Chainguard, we make open source software trustworthy by default, so engineering teams can innovate with speed and confidence. While Platform teams are focused on abstracting complexity away from developers, we can help Platform teams by abstracting away complexity and toil from building, hardening, and maintaining open source artifacts. The result is empowering Platform teams to provide secure, compliant, and developer-friendly experiences that actually drive adoption with purpose-built, secure, production-ready builds of the open source developers need across their use cases.

Chainguard provides:

• Zero-CVE container images, rebuilt daily: A catalog of 1,700+ CVE-free, trusted container images ensures developers always have up-to-date, secure building blocks. With over 7,000 version tags, developers can feel confident that their IDPs will have the artifacts and versions they need to build quickly. By removing stale artifacts and vulnerability backlogs, developers can have faith that the artifacts they’re leveraging will increase their deployment rates rather than put them at risk.

• Extensibility and customization: With the Chainguard Factory, Custom Assembly, and over 15,000 packages to choose from, Platform teams can customize and extend images to meet every developer's needs without compromising consistency. Golden images become team-specific and purpose-built, while apk repositories enable developers to add trusted packages as they need.

• Secure-by-default transparency: Every image includes transparent metadata, full provenance, and SBOMs, building trust and easing compliance. When developers have broad access to artifacts that meet Security team policies, adoption becomes the natural choice rather than a forced mandate.

• Ecosystem compatibility: Chainguard integrates seamlessly with existing platforms and workflows, allowing platform teams to maintain their SDLC processes and workflows. Adoption improves when the platform feels familiar instead of disruptive.

Adoption that delivers business impact

Driving developer adoption of internal development platforms may seem like a single metric, but it’s part of a larger outcome for many organizations: driving high velocity engineering. A well-adopted development platform leads to faster dev onboarding, deployment frequency, and minimizes build failures and rollback issues.

Collectively, that means organizations can accelerate their innovation while simultaneously reducing ongoing costs by consolidating developer workflows onto a single, adopted platform that eliminates redundant pipelines, stale images, and remediation toil.

From stalled adoption to competitive advantage

Without adoption, development platforms fail to deliver on their promise of speed, security, and consistency. Instead, they risk becoming shelfware while developers return to ad hoc tools.

Chainguard makes platforms usable by default. Our Zero-CVE, continuously updated images give developers a foundation they can trust. The Chainguard Factory makes customization straightforward, so platforms cover every team’s needs without fragmentation. And with built-in transparency, provenance, and ecosystem compatibility, security and compliance come along for the ride instead of slowing things down.

The stakes are high: modern engineering depends on secure, standardized workflows that developers actually use. With Chainguard, organizations can finally realize the future state of platform adoption: faster delivery, lower costs, and happier developers.

Now is the time to rethink your platform adoption strategy. Get in touch with our team to learn more.