Avoiding golden cages in Platform Engineering

I zipped up to London to share the Platform Engineering Pulse report with the amazing London DevOps group. Afterwards, we spent several hours talking through some of the findings and I thought I’d write up some of the results of those discussion. In particular, the question of whether platforms should be optional or mandatory has a lot of talking points. It also intersects with the golden cages problem, as an inflexible platform intensifies the nastiest problems of mandatory platforms. As we’re continuously talking golden paths, we’ll head to Oz to look through the hazards and how they come together to cause some serious problems. The wizard of ops Imagine our house has been lifted by a hurricane and deposited in a strange land. The friendly people we meet tell us about a golden path, and off we go to see a wizard. We sing a little tune, because we don’t yet know about the hazards awaiting us along the way. Why in Oz didn’t the munchkins mention the wolves, crows, and flying monkeys? T