Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency (via) This is smart: the "golden path" approach to encouraging a standard stack within a large engineering organization. If you build using the components on the golden path you get guaranteed ongoing support and as much free monitoring/tooling as can possibly be provided. I also really like the suggestion that this should be managed by a "council" of senior engineers with one member of the council rotated out every quarter to keep things from getting stale and cabal-like.
Charity Majors describes the process like this:
- Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.
- Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
- Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components ... but if they don't, they're on their own. They will have to support it themselves. [...]