Introduction

If you have been working with cloud infrastructure, you are probably familiar with this scenario: a developer needs to deploy a new application service. They copy infrastructure code from a previous project to replicate the necessary components. They modify configurations they don't fully understand. A few hours later, the deployment fails.

As we have briefly described in the previous example, infrastructure chaos is typical in organizations that have grown rapidly and can lead to inconsistent deployments and manual processes that create bottlenecks, configuration drift, and security incidents.

What if there were a clear, supported path for every infrastructure deployment? That’s the promise of golden paths; a way to transform chaotic infrastructure management into standardized, efficient workflows.

The Infrastructure Standardization Challenge

We often see in practice various teams in the same organization using different tools for similar tasks, effectively working in silos. Even more, infrastructure knowledge is scattered across individuals, with other teams adopting different standards without a consistent organizational approach to security, compliance, and governance. These governance gaps lead in turn to security vulnerabilities and visibility issues on the infrastructure level. In these cases, teams complain about slow deployment cycles due to manual approvals and a lack of autonomy.

What Are Golden Paths and Why Do You Need Them?

Golden Paths to the rescue! Golden paths are opinionated, well-documented approaches to building and deploying infrastructure. They provide an easy, quick, safe, and replicable way to accomplish everyday tasks that align with organizational standards. 

Instead of relying on individuals and teams to figure out how they can build and run their software and infrastructure components, golden paths offer ready-made workflows and create consistency by reducing complexity. Platform teams are responsible for defining these golden paths, organizational standards, and templates based on developers’ common pain points and needs. Users and developers then consume these golden paths, usually in a self-service fashion, speeding up software and infrastructure development and deployment lifecycles.

In cloud infrastructure, a golden path might include a standard way to deploy applications, configure CI/CD components, or manage Kubernetes clusters. In software development, it can consist of preferred languages, pre-configurable code repositories, frameworks, or security best practices.

The golden paths of an organization won’t be able to address all of the users' use cases, and that’s fine. Platform teams create golden paths for the most common and impactful scenarios, and they generally attempt to address around 80% of the organization’s flows. Developers should be able to bypass them and choose an alternative flow if their needs cannot be met with a golden path. Of course, bypassing golden paths comes with its own trade-offs, but it is a choice that users and platform teams should live with occasionally.

Organizations that work hard to understand their current blockers, pain points, and bottlenecks, and invest time and effort in improving their developer experience with concrete and impactful golden paths, are able to overperform their peers. They manage to reduce deployment times, decrease infrastructure-related incidents, improve developer onboarding speed, and, in general, lower the operational overhead and cognitive load of their users.

It might not be clear immediately, but this standardization in several layers provides competitive advantages with faster time to market for new features, consistent security posture across environments, improved compliance and audit readiness, and increased developer satisfaction. 

Implementing Golden Paths

Implementing the appropriate golden paths for your organization is a long process. Don’t try to address everything from the start. Assess your current infrastructure standardization maturity and start with a pilot golden path for your most frequent use case. Long-term, plan to expand golden paths to cover ~80% of use cases, integrate them with broader platform engineering initiatives, and establish a center of excellence for infrastructure best practices. Let’s take a look in more detail at how to approach the implementation below.

Phase 1: Understanding Your Current State

The first step is to understand your current situation by documenting current workflows, scanning existing resources across all environments, and gathering a comprehensive infrastructure inventory and dependency mapping. A crucial part of the process is interviewing developers about what they actually need to work more efficiently. You will be building this for your users, so make sure you are investing in the right things. Even more, task your platform team to identify configuration patterns and common inconsistencies,  assess security and compliance gaps, and look for cost optimization opportunities.

Phase 2: Creating Standardized Blueprints

When you have a holistic view of the current state, it’s time to put in the work and transform these insights into reusable patterns and automated workflows. A key job here is designing modular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates to deploy standard components such as databases, effectively creating a self-service catalog of components your users can pick from. On top of these, the platform team must establish governance policies, guardrails, and flows that will be served through the golden paths for the whole organization. Lastly, as not everything can be addressed with these workflows, the platform team must also define approval workflows for exceptions and clear guidance for these edge cases.

Phase 3: Enabling Governed Self-Service

After defining your priorities and having set up the foundation of blueprints and templates, it’s time to provide developers with streamlined deployment capabilities. This is usually achieved with an overall developer platform or portal that enables common deployment patterns via no-code interfaces. Stitching together templates, automated workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and policy enforcement during deployment, we can achieve an entirely governed self-service experience for our users with real-time compliance monitoring baked into the system.

Common Implementation Pitfalls and Solutions

Although golden paths provide numerous benefits, they can also bring problems if they are misused. A common anti-pattern is to build golden cages instead of golden paths. While attempting to simplify the developers’ lives, platform teams fall into the trap of overly restricting the workflows, leading to frustration if there is no flexibility to bypass them to accommodate edge cases. To avoid this, work with your users to provide escape hatches and clear escalation processes.

Another common pitfall is to widen the scope so much that organizations end up with complex interfaces that developers actually avoid. To stay on course and build a solution that your users will love, prioritize usability from early on, and gather continuous feedback as you progress.

Other times, platform teams focus solely on the developer experience and providing self-service capabilities, to the extent that they neglect to put in place the proper measures for effective governance. Automated policy enforcement and regular compliance reviews must be part of the overall solution from the early stages.
Lastly, as such an initiative requires an organizational transformation in the way people work, it requires executive support to succeed truly. Without strong backing from an executive sponsor, clear return on investment expectations, and alignment with business objectives, the initiative could easily lose momentum and get abandoned.

Measuring Golden Paths Success

But how do you measure the success of such an initiative across an organization? The trick is to avoid overly fixating on specific metrics, but blend in a mix of technical and business metrics that will give you a holistic view and score of how you operate with the new setup and its effect on business. 

The exact metrics that you can track vary from case to case, but common technical indicators include deployment frequency, change failure rate, time from code commit to production, compliance scores, mean time to recovery, uptime, application traffic and performance, test and IaC coverage, and security incident rates, among others.

On the business side, some examples of measurables include developer productivity improvements, time to market for new features, revenue impact, cost optimization, and operational overhead reduction.

Remember, this isn’t something that you set and forget. Such an endeavour requires a continuous improvement approach and regular feedback collection from development teams. Even more, set up a quarterly review of the platform and its associated golden paths' effectiveness and prioritize and iterate with enhancements based on usage patterns and feedback.

How Can StackGuardian Help You with Golden Paths?

To achieve the best results, you need to rely on tools that offer the right functionalities. The StackGuardian platform can enable your team to implement golden paths across all three implementation phases.

The Discover module can help with assessing your current infrastructure state by performing 1800+ automated checks for infrastructure discovery and compliance checking to provide actionable insights into cost, security, and compliance best practices.

Next, the Develop module enables the creation of the necessary guardrails and IaC blueprints based on discovered insights, with no-code policy development capabilities. These include parameterized infrastructure templates, policy-as-code enforcement capabilities, and the SGMarketplace for pre-built infrastructure templates that you can quickly use.

Lastly, the Deploy module enables self-service for developers and end-users through workflows with no-code interfaces. Deployment lifecycle management and continued compliance checks (such as Drift Detection) cover the “Day 2” operations side. It also offers integration capabilities with major cloud providers and CI/CD tools.

Ready to transform your infrastructure chaos into standardized golden paths? StackGuardian's integrated Discover-Develop-Deploy platform provides the foundation for implementing golden paths at scale. Book a demo today!