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Platform engineeringPlatform series

Platform engineering terms, decoded

Platform engineering is the rename of the year: the same infrastructure work, now with users who can say no. The vocabulary is where most conversations go wrong.

Quick reference

  • IDP — Internal Developer Platform: the self-service layer over Kubernetes and cloud, so developers touch neither.
  • Golden path — The supported route for a new service: template, CI, deploy, dashboards and alerts, already wired.
  • Service catalog — The index of every service, its owner, repo and dependencies. Backstage is the usual home for it.
  • Scorecard — An automatic per-service checklist: tests, SLO, runbook, owner. It shows gaps, not grades.
  • Tenant — One team's slice of the platform: namespace, quota, RBAC and cost, fenced off from the others.
  • Self-service — A team creates what it needs through a form or a pull request, without a ticket to the platform team.

Explained

The layer

An IDP, Internal Developer Platform, is the self-service layer a platform team runs over Kubernetes and cloud. Its job is to keep developers out of both. A golden path is the supported route for a new service: template, CI, deploy, dashboards and alerts, already wired. A default, not a mandate: teams can leave it, but they pay the support cost. A service catalog is the index of every service, its owner, repo and dependencies. Backstage is the usual home for it. A scorecard checks each service against tests, SLO, runbook and owner, automatically. It shows gaps, not grades. A tenant is one team's slice of the platform: namespace, quota, RBAC and cost, fenced off from the others. Self-service means a team creates what it needs through a form or a pull request, without a ticket to the platform team.

Why the words matter

Each one names a boundary: what the platform owns, what the team owns, and where the ticket queue used to be. Get them wrong and you build a portal nobody uses.

The honest caveat: a platform without a golden path is a portal with links. The path is the product.

The lesson: platform teams ship products, and developers are the users.

In one line

A platform is a product. Its users are developers, and its competition is a ticket queue.

Read the docs: backstage.io/docs

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