Developer Platform Principles

We have discovered a set of guiding principles that collectively shape our approach to building developer platforms. We organize them into four categories:

Core Philosophy

These principles shape the foundational mindset for building developer platforms:

• Your developer platform is a product
• The platform is a balancing act

Developer Experience

These principles focus on making developers productive and happy:

• Pre-built patterns are your leverage
• Enable developer self-service
• Make good practices the default
• Shift left

Technical Foundations

These principles establish the architectural patterns that make platforms reliable, scalable, and maintainable:

• Build platform components
• Represent all patterns as code
• Define all live infrastructure as pattern instances
• Embrace immutable infrastructure
• Use GitOps

Governance & Maintainability

These principles address how to meet your governance and maintainability needs as the platform scales:

• Guardrails over gates
• Offer "golden paths"