A custom platform API is an organization-specific interface that exposes engineering-platform capabilities to development teams. Treat it as a product surface: define its users and value before committing to a GUI, specialized infrastructure, or broad feature set. section 2.3.1
Start with demand rather than assumptions. If no teams use the platform yet, designing a GUI for its APIs may be premature; similar tools are often operated through a CLI. Capture requests as epics, then evaluate them against actual adoption, roadmap needs, cost, and operational performance. section 2.3.1
Synchronizing team access
An organization can use GitHub as the source of team membership, then expose a custom API that synchronizes those memberships with SaaS tools lacking native support. The same authentication and authorization model can protect platform infrastructure and custom API resources, while team membership controls access to Kubernetes resources. section 7.3.1
Figure 7.8 For Epetech, we would like our IDP service to have built-in or easily configurable means of integrating with GitHub, requiring authentication through whatever means we have set up in GitHub. As a result of (1) successful authentication, we want the IDP to (2) get the list of all teams the user is a member of in our GitHub organization. Finally, we want to (3) return to the user a secure means of accessing the platform infrastructure or custom API resources.
Trace the intended access flow: authenticate through GitHub-linked identity, retrieve organization team membership, and return secure access to platform infrastructure or custom API resources. section 7.3.1
