Comparison
Golden pathvsPaved road
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 →Paved road
doing it the standard way gets you logging, tracing, secrets and a pipeline for free; doing it your own way is allowed and unsupported.
A well-supported default route through the platform that is easier than the alternatives, without being mandatory. The consent matters: the road is chosen because it is genuinely faster, and the escape hatch exists so unusual cases do not have to fight. Its health is measured by what fraction of new services take it, and a paved road nobody uses is a statement about the road.
Full entry →