Should we build a developer portal like Backstage?

Only if you already have real golden paths to expose. A portal without paved roads is just a prettier Confluence. Start with templates, reusable CI workflows, and a standardized deploy contract; then add Backstage to make them discoverable and self-serve.

Isn’t this just platform engineering lock-in?

It’s lock-in to your own standards, not to a vendor. If you implement golden paths using commodity tools (Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions) and keep abstractions thin, you can evolve without rewriting everything.

How do we avoid becoming a bottleneck?

Make the default path self-serve and fast, publish explicit escape hatches, and version your building blocks. The platform team should ship templates and contracts, not manually provision environments for every request.

What metrics prove this is working?

Track time-to-first-deploy for new services, DORA metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR), adoption of golden paths, and cloud cost variance (especially around CPU/memory requests/limits and idle environments).

Platform-productivity · Jan 8, 2026 · 8 minute read

Your Engineers Didn’t Join to Debug Terraform: Build the Paved Road, Not Another Snowflake Tool

Internal tooling should hide infrastructure complexity, not repackage it. Here’s the playbook I’ve seen actually work: opinionated defaults, thin abstractions, and ruthless avoidance of bespoke platform products.

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Your Engineers Didn’t Join to Debug Terraform: Build the Paved Road, Not Another Snowflake Tool

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist