Platform Engineering

Who this course is for

This course is for infrastructure and DevOps engineers who are tired of being the bottleneck between developers and the systems they need to ship. If every new service still means a ticket to your team and a week-long wait, platform engineering is the discipline built to fix that — and this course assumes you already have solid infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes experience going in, since it builds a platform on top of those foundations rather than teaching them.

What you'll actually build

The course works through five problems in the order a platform team actually tackles them: platform engineering principles and golden paths — the opinionated, paved road that makes the right way the easy way for developers; internal developer platforms built with tools like Backstage and Crossplane, the actual software layer developers interact with; self-service infrastructure APIs that let developers provision what they need without filing a ticket; developer experience metrics using DORA and SPACE frameworks, so you can prove the platform is actually working rather than just assuming it is; and platform security and guardrails, so self-service doesn't mean giving up control over what gets deployed. Every module pairs a concepts lesson with a hands-on build.

The capstone

You finish by building a working internal developer platform MVP — golden paths, a self-service API surface, and guardrails, all wired together into something a development team could actually onboard onto. This is the artifact that goes in your portfolio, since it demonstrates the full platform engineering loop rather than just one piece of it.

Why this matters right now

Platform engineering has become one of the fastest-growing specializations inside infrastructure teams, precisely because most organizations discovered that "give every team a Kubernetes cluster and hope for the best" doesn't scale past a certain size. Engineers who can build the paved road — not just maintain the underlying infrastructure, but design the developer-facing layer on top of it — are in high demand, and DORA and SPACE fluency in particular signals you can back platform decisions with data instead of opinion.