Comparison
Infrastructure modulevsPaved road
Infrastructure module
the team's standard service takes six inputs and produces thirty resources, and nobody writes the thirty by hand any more.
A parameterised, reusable unit of infrastructure configuration with declared inputs and outputs. It is how a platform team encodes an opinionated default and how a golden path becomes a thing you can call rather than a document. The failure mode is the module with forty inputs, which is a leaky abstraction that has all the indirection of a module and none of the opinion.
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 →