§ 06 · Domain mastery

Platform Engineering

Internal platforms that ship features instead of tickets.

Golden paths for new services, paved roads for CI/CD, secrets, observability, and infra provisioning. Self-service where teams ship features instead of filing tickets, with the guardrails and scorecards that keep the platform itself honest — measured by adoption, not screenshots.

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§ I

Pillars

01

Golden paths, not gates

Templates that get a team from zero to production in an afternoon, with observability, secrets, and CI wired in. Opt-out beats opt-in.

02

Backstage as the front door

Service catalog, ownership, TechDocs, scorecards. Not a wiki — a single pane where teams find, own, and improve what they run.

03

Self-serve infra with guardrails

Crossplane or Terraform modules teams provision themselves, gated by OPA policy. Approvals only for what actually needs them.

04

Cost + reliability per team

Dashboards that attribute spend and error budget to the owning team. Platform decisions become negotiations with data.

05

Platform-as-product mindset

Roadmap, SLAs, user research on internal engineers. Adoption is measured; the platform team competes for it.

06

Migration muscle

Kubernetes to serverless, ECS to Fargate, self-hosted to managed. Migration playbooks that don't require a heroic sprint.

§ II

Domain vocabulary

The words that separate insiders from readers.

Golden pathThe blessed way to do the common thing. Teams that don't have one accumulate custom snowflakes and platform-team burnout.
Paved roadNetflix's term for the same idea, with more asphalt metaphor. Both point at the same discipline.
ScorecardBackstage's mechanism for measuring service maturity against your standards. Teams with scorecards run better platforms.
CrossplaneK8s-native infra provisioning as CRDs. Different mental model from Terraform; conflating the two is a tell.
Platform team as productThe reframing that separates platforms that get adopted from those that get worked around.
OPA / RegoPolicy engine that lives in every self-serve request. Teams that skip it become the ticket queue they were trying to eliminate.
Software supply chainAttestation, provenance, and the SBOM chain from source to deploy. Platform teams own it or explain why not.
Cognitive load (Skelton)The Team Topologies vocabulary. If your platform pushes cognitive load down to product teams, you built the wrong platform.
§ III

Open problems we help with

§ IV

What we ship

  1. 01A service catalog in Backstage with ownership and TechDocs.
  2. 02Golden-path templates for the top three service shapes.
  3. 03A self-serve infra layer gated by policy.
  4. 04Cost and reliability dashboards per team.
  5. 05A scorecard framework tied to your standards.
  6. 06A platform product roadmap and an SLA.
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