About this course
Platform engineering is about reducing cognitive load — not adding another internal product developers have to learn. This course teaches you to design and operate an IDP that developers actually use: self-service infrastructure, opinionated golden paths, and the metrics to prove it is working. We cover Backstage, Crossplane, Vault, and the organisational dynamics that determine whether a platform team succeeds or stagnates.
What you will learn
- The CNCF Platform Maturity Model and an honest assessment of where most organisations sit
- Designing golden paths that guide without forcing developers into a single lane
- Self-service infrastructure with Crossplane, Backstage, and Helm
- Building a service catalogue and software templates in Backstage
- Secrets management at scale with Vault and the External Secrets Operator
- Measuring developer productivity: DORA metrics, SPACE framework, and platform SLOs
- Compliance-as-code with Open Policy Agent and Kyverno
- Build vs buy: evaluating Backstage, Port, Cortex, and Humanitec
Your instructor
Ayodele Ajayi
Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer based in Kent, UK, with extensive experience across cloud-native security, platform engineering, and distributed systems. Ayodele has led engineering teams at scale and writes about what he learns — with a bias towards things that actually work in production.
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