Platform & DevOps·Running it: capacity, failure and recovery
you got a database, a queue and a domain name by opening a pull request instead of by waiting four days for a ticket.
Self-service platform
Also calledself-service infrastructure, no-ticket provisioning
Letting engineers provision and change infrastructure themselves within guardrails, rather than through a request queue. It removes the platform team from the critical path of every change, which is what makes it scale, and it depends entirely on the guardrails being real — policy, quotas, defaults and audit. Self-service without guardrails is not a platform, it is an unbounded permission grant.