Platform Engineering
A golden-path generator, then a service catalog, DORA metrics, preview environments and a platform API.
A platform team's product is the shortest safe path from an idea to production: a template that already made the boring decisions, a catalog that answers who owns what, a preview environment per pull request, an API that hides ten Kubernetes objects behind one, and numbers that show whether delivery is getting faster or just busier. Each of those is a small, buildable mechanism on top of what earlier phases taught. This phase builds them from the standard library and compares each with the tool platform teams adopt.
How this phase is built
| Lesson | Type | What you build | What you then use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Golden paths | Build | scaffolder: a validated template that generates a whole service repository and updates old services with a three-way merge | Backstage Software Templates, copier, cruft |
| Service catalog | Build | minicatalog: catalog entities, validation, two-way relations, blast-radius queries and scorecards | the Backstage catalog, Port, Cortex |
| DORA metrics | Build | minidora: the four keys from Git history, deployments and incidents, with percentiles and gaming warnings | Four Keys, GitHub deployments |
| Preview environments | Build | minienv: per-PR namespaces with quotas, network policy, author access, idempotent reconcile and a TTL reaper | ApplicationSet PR generator, vcluster |
| Platform API | Build | miniplatform: one workload spec expanded into Deployment, Service, HPA, PDB, NetworkPolicy and HTTPRoute, with versioned schemas | Score and score-k8s, KubeVela, Crossplane |
Further lessons for this phase are proposed in ROADMAP.md.
Reference layer
The long-form guide for this phase is the Platform Engineering learning path; cost allocation is covered in the Cloud phase's FOCUS lesson and the FinOps reference.