Starting a new application should not require months of coordination or a choice between a deadline and a suitable architecture. A golden path, also called a paved road, gives developers a supported route from a new application to production while incorporating the organization’s quality, security, and compliance requirements. section 13.1.1 section 13.2.1
Think of the path as a recipe: automate it where practical, and document any remaining manual steps. A path for a new Java API might establish repositories, infrastructure, and common libraries according to organizational conventions. As part of an internal developer platform, such paths make common tasks easier to perform without requiring every team to assemble its own route. section 13.2.1 section 13.6
A neobank’s paved road
At a mobile-first neobank, a developer used a platform CLI to answer a few questions and start a new microservice. The path typically took a service to production in less than a few hours. The platform supplied many defaults without hiding Kubernetes entirely—a deliberate balance between convenience and the ability to understand what is running. section 13.2.1
A path that extends into operations
La Redoute’s path includes self-service provisioning for pipelines, secrets, configuration, and service exposure. Its pipeline supports progressive deployments, while components provide foundations for logs and metrics. The route therefore supports teams beyond initial creation, into operating services in production. section 13.3
Keep the path useful rather than treating it as a mandate:
- Check domain boundaries before creating another service. Cheap provisioning can encourage too many highly coupled microservices. section 13.1.1
- Improve the platform incrementally in response to developer needs; a small set of standard pipelines can precede a fuller portal. section 13.3 section 13.6
- Do not assume every organization needs an internal developer platform. Consider team count, likely adoption, and whether existing offerings suffice. section 13.6
