Comparison
Golden pathvsInternal developer platform
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 →Internal developer platform
you deployed to a new environment without opening a ticket or learning what the infrastructure was.
The self-service layer product teams use to build, deploy and operate without becoming infrastructure specialists. Its value is measured in reduced cognitive load rather than in features, and its worst failure is being built for the platform team's idea of the problem rather than the product teams' actual work. Treating internal engineers as customers — including the part where they can refuse to use it — is what separates the ones that get adopted.
Full entry →