What Platform Engineering Is (and Isn't)

1. 1

   Interview your users first

   Before building anything, ask the ShopLite product teams what slows them down. In a real company, run 30-minute interviews and a short survey. Typical answers become the backlog. The fictional ShopLite answers are below; notice none of them say 'we need Backstage'.

   # ShopLite Platform Charter
   
   ## Users
   Four stream-aligned teams (storefront, checkout, catalog, fulfilment), ~30 engineers.
   
   ## What slows them down today (from interviews)
   1. New service takes ~2 weeks: repo, CI, Helm, Argo app, DNS, TLS, dashboards via tickets.
   2. Databases need a ticket to the platform team (3–5 days).
   3. Nobody knows who owns which service or where its runbook is.
   4. Security findings arrive late, after release.
   
   ## Platform capabilities (MVP)
   - Golden path: new service in < 15 minutes, production-ready by default.
   - Self-service PostgreSQL and S3 via a claim, within guardrails.
   - Service catalog with owners, docs, dashboards, and runbooks.
   - Guardrails as policy (not review meetings): Kyverno + CI checks.
   
   ## Success metrics
   - Lead time for a new service: 2 weeks → < 1 day
   - DORA: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, recovery time
   - Developer satisfaction survey (quarterly), golden-path adoption %
   
   ## Non-goals
   - Hiding Kubernetes completely; teams can still read and change their manifests.
   - Mandating the golden path; teams may leave it and own the result.

2. 2

   Create the platform repo, managed by Argo CD

   Platform add-ons are just more Applications, so reuse the app-of-apps pattern from the GitOps course (Mission 1.4). Each add-on gets a folder under addons/, and a root Application picks them all up. Everything in this course is installed through Git; you won't helm install by hand.

   apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
   kind: Application
   metadata:
     name: platform-root
     namespace: argocd
   spec:
     project: default
     source:
       repoURL: https://github.com/<you>/shoplite-platform.git
       targetRevision: main
       path: addons
       directory: { recurse: true, include: "*-app.yaml" }
     destination:
       server: https://kubernetes.default.svc
       namespace: argocd
     syncPolicy:
       automated: { prune: true, selfHeal: true }

   terminalcopy cmd

   $ mkdir -p shoplite-platform/{addons,argocd,docs} && cd shoplite-platform && git init -b main

   git add . && git commit -m 'platform: charter + root app' && git remote add origin git@github.com:<you>/shoplite-platform.git && git push -u origin main

   kubectl apply -f argocd/root.yaml

   ── expected output ──

   application.argoproj.io/platform-root created

Make each change, run the command, and read the error before revealing the diagnosis. Recognising these messages on sight is what makes you fast on a real team. Undo the change afterwards.