Why You Will Build a Platform (and What That Really Means)
Building “your own platform” is inevitable for any organization growing beyond a handful of teams and services. This does not mean inventing a brand-new stack. In practice, it means bringing order, consistency, and self-service to the tooling you already have—turning fragmented scripts, pipelines, and environments into coherent golden paths.
It’s Inevitable Because…
- Scale and complexity: More teams and services multiply tooling choices and operational variance when a platform standard is not in place.
- Compliance and security: You need consistent policy enforcement and auditability across apps and environments.
- Developer productivity: Teams need paved roads to reduce cognitive load and avoid re-solving the same problems.
- Business outcomes: Faster, safer delivery becomes a competitive necessity—not a nice-to-have.
What “Building a Platform” Really Means
- Standardize, don’t centralize everything: Provide opinionated templates, defaults, and APIs—keep autonomy where it matters.
- Codify the best path: Golden paths for common workflows (create service, build, test, deploy, observe, operate).
- Turn tickets into self-service: Replace manual handoffs with portal/CLI/API actions.
- Make existing tools coherent: Integrate your current CI/CD, IaC, runtime, and observability—minimize net-new tools.
Organizing the existing tooling chaos
Most “platform work” is curating and integrating the tools you already run, not buying or building more. Start by standardizing how teams use them.
Motivations and Benefits
- Consistency and reliability: Fewer snowflakes; safer changes by default.
- Faster flow of change: Shorter lead time, higher deployment frequency.
- Lower cognitive load: Teams focus on business logic instead of infrastructure quirks.
- Security and compliance by design: Policy baked into pipelines and runtime.
- Cost efficiency: Shared templates and guardrails reduce waste and duplication.
What Not to Do
- Don’t build a monolith: Aim for the thinnest viable platform that solves the most common problems first.
- Don’t chase tools: Favor standardization over adding new vendors or bespoke components.
- Don’t remove autonomy: Provide defaults and APIs; let teams extend when justified.
- Don’t hide in a cave: Solve real problems that teams face on a regular basis.
How to Start
- Map the journeys: Document the top workflows (create service, deploy, rollback, debug).
- Get sponsorship: This will require a dedicated team and cross-functional collaboration fro others to align priorities and resources, not to mention a clear understanding that management goals must adapt.
- Pick the first golden path: Standardize the highest-volume, highest-friction journey. Look for an obvious and measurable ROI to build consensus on.
- Codify as templates + APIs: CI/CD, IaC, runtime baselines, and policy-as-code. There is always something that people have long struggled to achieve.
- Ship self-service: Portal/CLI to replace the most common tickets.
- Measure impact: Track DORA and adoption metrics from day one. Remember: platform value appears in downstream metrics, not as a plain platform output. Learn to capture the ROI of your platform to make ROI visible.
How to Prove It Works
- Use outcome metrics that matter to the business. See: Success Metrics.
- Anchor platform scope in team cognition and interactions. See: Team Topologies.
- Ground your architecture and operating model in modern practices. See: Cloud Native Transformation.