Comparison
Golden pathvsInfrastructure as code
Golden path
there was a supported way to spin up a new service, and doing it that way took an afternoon instead of a fortnight.
A supported, opinionated, well-lit route for doing common engineering work — creating a service, adding a database, shipping to production. It is not a mandate: teams may leave the path, but they carry the operational burden themselves, which makes the choice honest. It is how a platform organisation gets standardisation without a governance board, because the standard route is genuinely the easy one.
Full entry →Infrastructure as code
you change the load balancer by editing a file and opening a pull request, not by clicking around in a console.
Declaring infrastructure in version-controlled files applied by tooling. It gives review, history, and the ability to recreate an environment. The gap to watch is between declared and actual state: manual changes make the next apply either a no-op that lies or a surprise that reverts something load-bearing.
Full entry →