Reliability by Default: Platform Work for SRE
Learn to scale reliability beyond your own services: golden paths with safe defaults, catalog ownership, platform SLOs, and adoption you can measure.
What You'll Learn
Understanding Why Reliability Does Not Scale Through Heroics
By now you have fixed acme-shop's checkout, tested it with chaos, and reviewed new designs. Then six more teams start shipping services.
Designing Golden Paths With Reliable Defaults
A golden path works only if it is easier than the alternative. A path that is merely approved gets ignored.
Using the Catalog for Ownership and Blast Radius
The SRE reason for a service catalog is simple: during an incident, you need to know who owns a service and what depends on it, in seconds.
Setting Platform SLOs
If the platform is a product, its users are other teams, and they deserve measured promises.
Measuring Adoption and Impact
A platform nobody uses has failed, however well built it is.
Enforcing Defaults With Policy Checks
Defaults protect the teams that use the path. Checks protect the ones that do not.
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index8 topics
Understanding Why Reliability Does Not Scale Through Heroics
By now you have fixed acme-shop's checkout, tested it with chaos, and reviewed new designs.
Designing Golden Paths With Reliable Defaults
A golden path works only if it is easier than the alternative. A path that is merely approved gets ignored.
Using the Catalog for Ownership and Blast Radius
The SRE reason for a service catalog is simple: during an incident, you need to know who owns a service and what...
Setting Platform SLOs
If the platform is a product, its users are other teams, and they deserve measured promises.
Measuring Adoption and Impact
A platform nobody uses has failed, however well built it is.
Enforcing Defaults With Policy Checks
Defaults protect the teams that use the path. Checks protect the ones that do not.
Building the Hands-On Golden Path Lab
You will build a scaffold that generates a safe service, a check that rejects unsafe ones, and apply the result to...
Quick Reference and Common Mistakes
Quick reference Common mistakes Building a path that is more configurable than opinionated turns a paved road into a...
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
Site Reliability Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Platform Engineer
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding SheetFrequently Asked Questions
A golden path is a pre-built, opinionated way to do a common task, such as deploying a service, that is easier than doing it by hand. Because it is the easy option, teams choose it without being forced, and they get reliability defaults for free.
Normal SRE work fixes one service at a time. Platform work changes the defaults so that every new service starts reliable. The aim is to make the reliable choice the easiest choice.
Use SLOs for internal promises and measure them with error budgets. Keep the word SLA for commitments with external consequences, such as contracts. Internal teams still need clear, measured promises, and SLOs give you that.
Track whether teams actually use it. Golden path adoption, time to first deploy, and platform-caused incidents tell you more than how elegant the tooling is.