Most IDPs go through three painful stages: no users, wrong abstractions, and the moment someone realizes it has to be operated as a product.

SLO targets need to match observability maturity, not a generic standard. Sometimes leveling up observability is the precondition, not a parallel track.

The difference between a useful IDP and a costly one is rarely the technology. It's the discipline of building for actual users and admitting what's not working.

Application CI/CD is well-trodden. Infrastructure CI/CD is younger and stranger, and applying application patterns directly to it produces predictable failures.

The shape of your IaC architecture is downstream of team size. Most pain comes from running yesterday's architecture at today's scale.