Platform engineering¶

Building an internal platform as a product: golden paths, self-service APIs, guardrails, and the measurement that tells you whether any of it helped. The point is not more capability, it is less cognitive load for the teams using it.

flowchart TB
  DEV[Stream-aligned teams] -->|self-service| IF[Interfaces:<br/>APIs, CLI, portal, templates]
  IF --> CAP[Platform capabilities]

  subgraph CAP[Platform capabilities]
    PROV[Provisioning<br/>control plane, IaC]
    DEL[Delivery<br/>GitOps, progressive delivery]
    OBS[Observability<br/>telemetry by default]
    SEC[Guardrails<br/>policy, supply chain, tenancy]
  end

  CAP --> INFRA[Kubernetes, cloud services]
  DEV -.feedback.-> PT[Platform team]
  PT -.roadmap.-> CAP
  CAP -.evidence.-> COMP[Compliance + audit]

The feedback arrow is the one that matters. A platform nobody adopts voluntarily has failed, whatever its technical quality.

Learn¶

• CI/CD explained - the delivery layer platforms automate
• Terraform explained - infrastructure as code
• Kubernetes in 10 minutes - the substrate most platforms build on
• Deployment strategies - rolling, blue-green, canary
• Autoscaling explained - capacity as a platform capability
• Observability basics - what the platform should provide by default
• Secrets management - a capability every platform must solve once

Reference¶

• Architecture patterns - the designs platforms encode as golden paths
• Zero trust architecture - the identity model tenants sit inside
• Cell-based architecture - blast radius reduction at scale
• Service comparison: DevOps and CI/CD
• Kubernetes troubleshooting
• AI security - the guardrails an AI-era platform now needs

Build¶

• Build a CI/CD pipeline
• Set up a Kubernetes cluster
• Build infrastructure with Terraform
• Set up a monitoring stack
• Implement zero trust

Certify¶

The platform discipline itself - CNPA - Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate - the vendor-neutral certification for this role

The layers a platform assembles - CGOA - Certified GitOps Associate - the delivery model - CAPA - Certified Argo Project Associate - Argo CD, Workflows, Rollouts, Events - OTCA - OpenTelemetry Certified Associate - observability as a capability - CCA - Cilium Certified Associate - the networking and policy datapath - CKA and CKS - operating and securing the substrate - HashiCorp Terraform Associate - infrastructure as code - GitHub Actions - pipeline automation

Cloud-specific platform work - AWS DevOps Engineer Professional - Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) - GCP Cloud DevOps Engineer

Roadmap¶

The full path is in Platform Engineer roadmap. The adjacent view is DevOps/SRE roadmap.