Paved Roads, Golden Paths, Guardrails and Railroads
Paved roads, golden paths, guardrails and railroads: They are all pieces of the same puzzle. Basically, they are collections of best practices, rules, tools and boundaries set by platform engineers to help developers perform swiftly and securely, while minimizing their cognitive load.
While these terms may initially appear synonymous and are often used as such, their intended purpose and degree of specific guidance differ. Used together, they can operate within a broader framework like a railroad network.
Paved Roads: Your Standard Development Route
Consider a frequently traveled road for cars heading to a particular destination. Its familiarity makes it the preferred and standardized option for drivers. It’s simple and has clear signs, recommended routes and exits to make the whole journey secure and efficient, preventing drivers from making mistakes.
Similarly, imagine that platform engineers lay out smooth and recommended routes for developers. These routes are paved roads and refer to standardized, well-known and well-documented sets of tools, practices and processes designed to streamline the entire software delivery life cycle (SDLC).
Paved roads represent beaten pathways within an internal developer platform (IDP) that guide development teams through complexity, from coding to deployment and monitoring.
The main goal is to enhance efficiency, collaboration and overall quality by establishing a common framework and ensuring a consistent approach across the organization. Some examples of paved roads include detailed documentation and guidelines, protocols and strategies, ready-made templates and intelligent dashboards.
Paved Roads: Benefits and Pitfalls
Paved roads benefit developers throughout the SDLC with:
- Standardization: Coherence among tools, practices and processes across teams enables better consistency and reduces the odds of fragmentation.
- Streamlined workflows: Paved roads define clear steps and embed best practices that minimize vagueness and redundancy, while optimizing the developer experience and preserving velocity.
- Autonomy: Paved roads are recommendations, so they offer a route. Developers can adjust those suggestions according to their needs. In essence, devs make choices within a defined pathway, providing autonomy.
- Cooperation: Developers are aware that they use the same tools and abide by the same practices. This facilitates easier knowledge sharing and fosters strong group culture.
However, challenges are around the corner without proper implementation:
- Bad habits: Paved roads, while providing standardization and streamlined workflows, can sometimes formalize existing, potentially inefficient developer behaviors, perpetuating bad habits.
- Pain transfer: If poorly designed, paved roads might transfer pain points from developers to the platform team, overcomplicating things.
Paved roads stem from Netflix. Netflix uses a combination of cultural norms and specific tooling to standardize development, especially for its vast microservices architecture based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This includes standardized pipelines, reusable building blocks and templates that promote consistency in building and operating highly available and secure solutions.
Golden Paths: Curated Routes To Code Completion
Let’s stick to the road analogy. Think of a perfectly constructed highway: wide roads, well-separated lanes, clearly visible signs.
Drivers don’t even need to plan the best route because they just have to follow the road. They have the most efficient and opinionated way to reach a destination, as if they were guided by a predetermined, optimal GPS route.
In the same way, golden paths refer to opinionated, task-specific, built-in paths for creating software. They represent consistent tools, integrated code and capabilities that help developers accelerate project development.
Developers implement curated and well-chosen paths to fulfill a specific task. This results in simplified decision-making so they can focus on crafting the best application within the time goal. An example would be specifying the exact versions of libraries, databases and key components to be used for a specific type of application. Quality checks, compliance and audit requirements are embedded to reduce burdens on developers and enable the correct implementation of golden paths.
Golden Paths: Benefits and Constraints
Generally speaking, golden paths guarantee improved performance, better consistency and optimized overall developer experience. Here are some advantages:
- Opinionated: Golden paths empower developers with clear, specifically designed methods, streamlining decision-making.
- Support behind the scenes: A platform team curates and actively maintains golden paths for guidance on demand and quick issue resolution.
- Specificity: Golden paths are tailored to accomplish specific development goals — for instance, creating a backend or mobile service — that reduce ambiguity.
- Cognitive burden reduction: Well-defined paths can abstract complexities, allowing developers to focus on specific functionalities.
- Self-service access: Developers can discover and use modules and components independently through the internal developer portal.
- Flexibility: Developers can deviate from the predefined path, but are aware that following opinionated best practices helps them accelerate the whole process.
Unfortunately, golden paths also have their own pain points:
- Golden cages: Poor design choices or excessively prescriptive rules can hinder innovation or limit the use of specialized tools.
- Continuous maintenance: Constant support requires regular updates to avoid consolidating obsolete practices or unreliable dependencies.
- Overcomplication: Some tasks don’t necessarily require opinionated step-by-step guidance. Implementing golden paths unnecessarily can overcomplicate processes rather than simplify them.
The origin of golden paths traces back to Spotify, which first mentioned golden paths in relation to its portal, Backstage.
Backstage serves as the central hub for Spotify’s golden paths, offering software templates for various projects (backend services, websites, data pipelines). This provides an opinionated, officially supported way to start new projects, continuously automating common processes to simplify documentation, onboarding and development.
Guardrails: Keeping Your Software Journey on Track
Think of guardrails as the physical barriers along a road that prevent a vehicle from leaving the track or deviating into unsafe areas.
Guardrails are limitations, guidelines, rules or architectural boundaries set by enterprise architects to guide developers. They represent the safety barriers along paved roads and golden paths, preventing developers from accidentally deviating into dangerous territory or making mistakes that could break things.
Essentially, guardrails provide an additional layer of proactive and automatic control to ensure adherence to established policies and best practices. This way, development tasks remain within acceptable boundaries of risk, compliance and operations, without hindering innovation.
Examples of guardrails include automated checks, tools, alerts or extensive documentation. A guardrail might prevent a developer from deploying an application with known security vulnerabilities. It could also involve validating scripts that set controls before changes are applied. Or, it could provide relevant context to feed AI agents.
Guardrails: Protective Measures or No Way Out?
Just like barriers on the road assist you in staying on track, guardrails help avoid pitfalls, misconfigurations and actions leading to vulnerabilities or instability. Some benefits include:
- Safe invention: Developers are free to test and try new things within defined limits. Their thirst for innovation is regulated by automated checks that replace manual monitoring.
- Proactive enforcement: Guardrails, implemented through Everything as Code (EaC) and Policy as Code (PoC), enforce compliance and security policy, mitigating risks and failures and accelerating safe, self-service deployments.
- Automation: In case of changes, guardrails allow for prompt discoverability and validation. Automated checks serve as filters that enable rapid identification and issue remediation.
But what about overprotection or badly implemented protective measures?
- Careful implementation: Badly configured or outdated guardrails can introduce risks or strengthen misplaced confidence.
- No way out: Overly rigid guardrails can leave developers feeling stifled, limiting their efforts to innovate.
- Integration complexity: Guardrails need seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines to be efficient. This integration can be challenging due to complex toolchains, diverse technologies, silos, the lack of organizational maturity or skills gaps.
- Cultural resistance: Developers might not always agree with certain limitations and rules. For guardrails to be effective, a cultural shift is necessary, beginning with constructive, contextual feedback viewed as an opportunity for improvement.
Guardrails emerged organically as a concept in platform engineering and DevSecOps to emphasize effective platform governance and its automation capabilities.
AWS uses identity access management policies and service control policies as core guardrails for permissions and organizational restrictions with its Cloud Security product. AWS CloudFormation Guard validates Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates against security and cost policies before deployment. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails filter harmful content and redact sensitive information in AI prompts/outputs, ensuring responsible AI consumption.
The Railroad Framework: Development at Full Speed Ahead
What if paved roads, golden paths and guardrails could be integrated into one broader, holistic paradigm?
Think of railroads as standardized, automated tracks for specific, high-speed trains. Tracks are so well-defined that they allow incredible speed and reliability, with little to no margin of deviation. The railroad framework encompasses the entire software development ecosystem designed to carry development projects from initial concept to final deployment with optimal speed, safety and efficiency.
This structured system turns development into a train journey by setting up clear tracks: Paved roads could be the main lines for common tasks, golden paths could be the fast lanes for critical tasks, while guardrails could be signals and measures to keep everything safe and on track. In this scenario, the platform engineering team acts like a railway network operator. They make sure everything runs smoothly so that projects reach their destination without a hitch.
The Railroad Framework: A Big Picture
Looking at the bigger picture, the most significant advantages of adopting such a structured framework are:
- Time to market: Optimized tracks ensure the development bullet train gets to the destination earlier, safe and sound. This framework dramatically shortens development cycles, leading to a faster time to market.
- Cost reduction: Standardization and AI-powered automation can increase efficiency and issue detection earlier, leading to significantly reduced costs.
- Reliability: Embedded best practices and AI-driven automated checks help create solid and reliable software.
- Developer productivity: Developers can unleash their creativity because automation and convenient interfaces ease their cognitive load.
- Scalability and predictability: Starting small and scaling gradually is key. A meticulously designed ecosystem prevents issues, ensuring projects scale well and handle unexpected challenges with ease.
- Governance and compliance: Boundaries, rules, extensive documentation. It’s like having a strategic traffic playbook that ensures adherence to approved, secure and compliant pathways.
- AI adoption: Context-aware AI systems enhance automation and safety measures for prediction and intelligent alerting. In a way, AI behaves like an autonomous conductor, facilitating high-speed development under the scrutiny of human supervisors.
Most difficulties of the railroad framework involve careful planning, a certain degree of maturity and a significant initial investment in expertise and resources for both building and maintenance. Finally, the system should also be designed to be resilient and adaptive, given the evolving technologies, threats and business needs.
To Sum Up
Paved roads, golden paths, guardrails and railroads represent best practices and boundaries that help developers operate securely and efficiently throughout the SDLC.
While paved roads are standardized and distinguished recommendations, golden paths are much more opinionated and task-specific. Guardrails are the safety barriers put along the way to avoid harmful deviations. All together, they shape a larger, systemic framework comparable to an interconnected railroad network.
They are all useful but also have pain points and challenges. The proper implementation of such a complex framework requires readiness, planning, adaptation and heavy investments in resources and expertise.
