Every company that has been on Kubernetes for three years eventually announces a developer portal. Then the portal fills with stale docs, two competing "create service" buttons, and a Slack channel that is the real platform.
I like platform engineering. I do not like portal theater.
What a golden path actually is
A golden path is the default way to:
- Start a service with logging, metrics, auth, and a pipeline that can reach production
- Roll forward and back without a custom YAML dialect
- Get a preview environment that dies when the PR dies
If those paths are not the easiest paths, developers will invent worse ones. That is not insubordination. That is the system working as designed.
What I would measure
- Time from empty repo to a URL a PM can click
- Number of services not on the paved path, and why
- How often the platform team is a ticket queue versus a product team
Self-service only counts if the self is not filling out a 14-field form to get a namespace.
In delivery org work, the platform is successful when squads stop asking for cluster access and start asking for better defaults. If they still need a human to ship a hello-world, you built a concierge, not a platform.
Takeaways
- Own the workflow, not the wallpaper.
- Make the paved path the fastest path.
- Count unofficial stacks. They are your real backlog.