Quiz: Platform Engineering

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3 questions

L0 (1 questions)

1. What is the fundamental difference between a platform and an ops ticket queue?

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A platform is a self-service product — developers run a CLI or click a UI and get infrastructure provisioned in minutes. A ticket queue means developers file a Jira ticket, an ops engineer provisions manually, and it takes 3-5 days. If every request still needs a platform team member to act, you have just renamed 'ops' to 'platform' without changing the bottleneck.

L1 (1 questions)

1. What is a golden path in platform engineering, and why is it not called the 'only path'?

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A golden path is an opinionated, well-supported, recommended way to accomplish a common task (e.g., deploying a new service). It is not the only path because some teams have legitimate reasons to diverge. The golden path provides templates, CI/CD, observability, and deployment automation out of the box. Teams that go off-path can, but their deviations should be tracked.

L2 (1 questions)

1. What DORA metrics should a platform team track to know if their platform is working?

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Lead time for changes (commit to production), deployment frequency (how often teams deploy), time to onboard (new service to production), self-service ratio (percentage of infra requests handled without a ticket), mean time to recover (how quickly teams fix production issues), platform adoption (percentage of teams on golden paths), and developer satisfaction (NPS or survey).