Platform Engineering Training — IDPs, Golden Paths & Developer Self-Service

Who Should Attend

This program is for senior DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and infrastructure architects building or evolving internal developer platforms. If your organization has 50+ developers, infrastructure provisioning takes days or weeks, and every team is reinventing their CI/CD and infrastructure setup — this course teaches you to build a platform that makes developers autonomous while keeping governance automated. Engineering leaders evaluating platform team structures will benefit from the organizational design modules.

Learning Outcomes

• Design an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using Backstage with Software Catalog, Templates, and TechDocs
• Build golden path templates that let developers provision infrastructure, CI/CD, and environments in minutes
• Implement self-service infrastructure APIs using Terraform modules and Crossplane
• Define and enforce governance policies that are baked into golden paths, not bolted on as gates
• Measure platform success through developer NPS, onboarding time, and adoption metrics
• Design platform team topology using Team Topologies patterns

Course Modules

1. Platform Engineering Fundamentals — History. Why platform engineering emerged. Platform as Product. Cognitive load theory applied to infrastructure.
2. Platform Architecture — API design for platforms. Platform boundaries. Platform vs. application infrastructure. Multi-tenancy.
3. Backstage — Developer Portal — Software Catalog. Software Templates. TechDocs. Plugins. Customization. Production deployment.
4. Golden Path Templates — Designing supported, tested, reusable infrastructure templates. Terraform modules as building blocks. Helm charts for application deployment.
5. Self-Service Infrastructure — API-driven provisioning. Crossplane for cloud resources. Environment-as-a-Service. Preview environments per PR.
6. Configuration Management for Platforms — Ansible, Chef, Puppet at platform scale. Managing configurations across 100+ services. Drift detection.
7. CI/CD for the Platform — Reusable pipeline templates (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI). Testing infrastructure code. Platform CI/CD vs. application CI/CD.
8. Governance by Default — OPA policies in golden paths. Cost guardrails. Security guardrails. Compliance evidence auto-generated from platform telemetry.
9. Platform Observability — Monitoring the platform itself. Developer experience metrics. Platform SLOs. Capacity planning for platform infrastructure.
10. Platform Team Organization — Team Topologies. Platform team types. Engagement models. Platform adoption patterns. Measuring platform team effectiveness.
11. Developer Experience (DX) — Measuring DX. Developer NPS. Onboarding time. Time-to-10th-PR. Continuous DX improvement.
12. Capstone: Platform Build — Design and build a minimum viable IDP with Backstage, 5 golden path templates, self-service provisioning, and governance.

Hands-on Labs (24 total)

Labs include: “Deploy Backstage and register 10 services in the Software Catalog,” “Create a golden path template that provisions an EKS namespace, CI/CD pipeline, and monitoring,” “Write an OPA policy that enforces cost limits on self-service infrastructure,” “Implement Crossplane to provision AWS RDS instances through a Kubernetes API.”

Real-World Projects

• Project 1: Build a minimum viable Internal Developer Platform with Backstage
• Project 2: Design and implement 3 golden path templates (backend service, frontend service, data pipeline)
• Project 3: Implement a platform observability dashboard tracking developer onboarding time, template usage, and infrastructure provisioning time

Corporate Training Option

We work with your platform team to adapt the curriculum to your IDP (Backstage, Port, custom). Your golden paths become the lab material. Your developers’ pain points become the case studies. Contact us for a tailored platform engineering enablement program.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we need to use Backstage? No. While Backstage is the most widely adopted IDP framework, platform engineering principles apply regardless of the tool. We cover Backstage because it’s the industry standard, but the concepts — golden paths, self-service APIs, governance by default — work with any platform framework or custom solution.

Is Platform Engineering just DevOps renamed? No. Platform Engineering is a specific discipline within the broader DevOps movement. It focuses on building internal products (platforms) that reduce cognitive load for development teams. DevOps is the culture and practices for the full delivery lifecycle. Platform Engineering is how you scale DevOps practices across 50+ development teams without every team needing a DevOps expert.