Context
250+ product engineers needed infrastructure to ship. Each new service meant a ticket, a queue, and a platform engineer assembling much the same set of resources as last time.
The problem
Twelve days is not a tooling problem, it is a queue problem, and queues are a symptom. Every recurring request was evidence of work that should not have needed a human. The risk in fixing it is the usual one: guardrails that slow people down get routed around, and then the guardrails protect nothing.
- step: Engineerneeds a service
- step: Backstagegolden path template
- data: Terraform modulesnetwork · IAM · compute · storage
- control: Plan on PRreviewed change
- result: Provisionedunder a day
Approach
- 01
Treat recurring infrastructure work as a product bug
Each request that arrived repeatedly became a candidate for a module or a template rather than a faster ticket.
- 02
Build reusable Terraform modules, not snippets
Networking, IAM, compute and storage as composable modules, so a new service is an assembly of reviewed parts rather than a fresh authoring exercise.
- 03
Expose them as Backstage golden paths
Self-service scaffolding puts the modules behind a form. An engineer provisions a service without needing to know Terraform, and without filing a ticket.
- 04
Make the paved road genuinely shortest
The golden path had to be the fastest route to production, or engineers would work around it. Adoption is the measure of whether that succeeded.