Garanti del Talento

dgt_plat10 – Platform Engineering Introduction

Module Title: dgt_plat10 – Platform Engineering Introduction

Description:

Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and running an Internal Developer Platform (IDP): a curated set of tools, APIs and workflows that lets product teams build, ship and operate software in self-service, without opening a ticket for every database, namespace or pipeline. This module introduces the ideas behind the discipline and shows how it builds on the DevOps and SRE practices covered in the previous modules.

Module Objectives:

  1. From DevOps to Platform Engineering: Understand why "you build it, you run it" created cognitive overload for development teams, and how a platform team reduces it without going back to silos.

  2. Platform as a Product: Treat the platform as a product with internal customers: user research, roadmap, documentation, adoption metrics and a clear contract between the platform team and its users.

  3. Golden Paths: Learn what a golden path (paved road) is: an opinionated, supported way to create and operate a service that is easy to follow but never mandatory.

  4. Team Topologies: Place the platform team in the Team Topologies model (stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem and platform teams) and its interaction modes.

  5. Measuring the Platform: Use DORA metrics, developer experience surveys and adoption data to decide whether the platform is actually helping.

Module Content:

  • Anatomy of an IDP: Developer portal, service catalog, infrastructure orchestration, CI/CD, observability and security as building blocks.

  • Self-service APIs: Why the core of a platform is a set of declarative APIs, and the portal is only one of its interfaces.

  • Thinnest Viable Platform: Starting small: a wiki page and a few templates can be a platform; avoid building a product nobody asked for.

  • Anti-patterns: Ticket-driven platforms, mandatory paths, platforms built without users, and "rebranded ops teams".

  • The CNCF view: The CNCF Platforms White Paper and maturity model as a shared vocabulary.

Hands-on lab in natural language:

Students describe, in natural language, the current path a developer follows to get a new service into production on the GDT lab infrastructure. The AI agent maps every step and hand-off; students then design together the first golden path that the rest of the module will implement.

Target Audience:

This module is for students who have completed the Linux, DevOps and Containers modules, and for system administrators, DevOps engineers and SREs who want to move towards Platform Engineering. Experience with Kubernetes is recommended.

The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy