What are golden paths?
Sometimes referred to as “paved roads”, they are the tried-and-tested routes to building and deploying reliable software. They are opinionated, well-documented and describe precisely how to carry out specific Engineering tasks within an organisation.
The term was coined at Spotify, an early pioneer in Platform Engineering. The name was taken from Frank Herbert’s “Children of Dune”, a sci-fi novel in which the “golden path” is the only future in which humanity survives.
Golden paths are a fundamental concept within Platform Engineering, designed to reduce cognitive load and abstract away complexity. This allows Developers to focus on building, rather than configuring systems.