Comparison
Paved roadvsSelf-service platform
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 →Self-service platform
you got a database, a queue and a domain name by opening a pull request instead of by waiting four days for a ticket.
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.
Full entry →