The team began from chaotic, ad hoc infrastructure and deliberately prioritized principles before choosing tools. The platform MVP focused on one concrete journey: new backend service to CI, deploy, and rollback. The chosen principles were GitOps for consistency, Infrastructure as Code for transparency, and guardrails rather than gates to preserve developer autonomy. The implementation mapped every touchpoint: GitHub Actions for builds, container images, ArgoCD syncing Helm charts to Kubernetes, and observability with Sentry, Prometheus, and Grafana. The platform provided templates and guarded self-service, then iterated based on developer feedback and operational telemetry.
We didn't start with tools. We started with chaos. In Part 1, we learned why platform engineering matters.In Part 2, we explored what a platform engineering team does. Now comes the messy, beautiful truth: how it's actually done. This is the story of building our first golden path - not a grand vision, but one real, working journey. Press enter or click to view image in full size How we built our Golden Path? Prefer visuals over text?
It took one tense meeting to realize we were grabbing knives before deciding what to cook. So we paused and asked: What journeys should a dev complete without opening a Slack thread? What needs to be self-served? What's our "platform MVP"? We weren't building a cathedral.We were starting with one dish: deploying a backend service safely. We chose principles first:✅ GitOps for consistency✅ IaC for transparency✅ Guardrails, not gates The tech came after.
Section 3: One Golden Path, End-to-End The dish we picked? "New backend service → CI → deploy → rollback" Sounds simple. Wasn't. Some devs were skeptical."Isn't this just another infra ticket wrapped in a CLI?" But we mapped every touchpoint: GitHub push triggers GitHub Actions → container build ArgoCD syncs the Helm chart to Kubernetes Sentry, Prometheus, Grafana wired in
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