When embarking on platform engineering initiatives, it’s rare to start with a blank slate. In reality, engineering teams often have established development practices, utilize a variety of tools, and have overlapping support needs.
With multiple priorities, how do you decide where to start? Understanding the categories of golden paths is crucial for prioritizing them.
Here’s a strategy to consider:
Begin by focusing on the automating day two tasks. These are the activities that teams engage in regularly to maintain and optimize their services post-launch. Since these tasks are recurrent and impact multiple teams, automating them can quickly free up valuable time, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.
How do you know if your platform engineering efforts are making a difference? Golden paths to automate gathering insights are essential to answer critical questions regarding the influence of platform engineering efforts on developer productivity and service quality. This feedback loop is essential for validating the effectiveness of your platform engineering strategy and guiding further improvements.
Finally, consider the service onboarding golden path as a means to unify and streamline various distinct processes into a cohesive workflow. This golden path is about making it simpler for new services to be introduced, integrated, and supported within your infrastructure. By consolidating disparate tasks into a single, streamlined process, you can significantly reduce the complexity and time required for onboarding, fostering a more agile and responsive development environment.
Prioritizing golden paths in this manner ensures that platform engineering efforts are aligned with the immediate needs and long-term objectives of your engineering teams. By automating day-to-day operations, facilitating insights gathering, and simplifying service onboarding, you lay a solid foundation for a scalable, efficient, and innovative development ecosystem.