Part 6 · 1 chapters · ~8 min

Platform Teams and Paved Roads

Platform as a product, golden paths and service templates, what the paved road includes (CI/CD, telemetry, auth, secrets, deploys), leaving the road with a reason, internal developer portals, measuring adoption and lead time, and team topologies (stream-aligned, platform, enabling).

Make the right way the easy way

code

# Backstage software template (excerpt): scaffolds a Node service on the paved road
apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3
kind: Template
metadata: { name: node-service, title: Node.js service (paved road) }
spec:
  parameters: [{ properties: { name: { type: string }, owner: { type: string, ui:field: OwnerPicker } } }]
  steps:
    - { id: fetch, action: fetch:template, input: { url: ./skeleton, values: { name: '${{ parameters.name }}' } } }
    - { id: publish, action: publish:github, input: { repoUrl: 'github.com?repo=${{ parameters.name }}&owner=acme' } }
    - { id: register, action: catalog:register, input: { repoContentsUrl: '${{ steps.publish.output.repoContentsUrl }}' } }

Team Topologies (Skelton and Pais) names four team types: stream-aligned teams deliver product, platform teams provide internal services, enabling teams coach, and complicated-subsystem teams own deep specialities (a fraud model, a payment switch). Paved roads reduce the cognitive load on stream-aligned teams.

THE PAVED ROAD

the supported path is the easiest path

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the template

A new service starts from a template with the framework, linting, tests, Dockerfile, catalogue entry and runbook skeleton already in place.

minutes to a production-ready skeletonBackstage software templates