Plaform Engineering Roadmap

An opinionated roadmap to become a Platform Engineer.

The roadmap is inspired by Teivah's SRE roadmap, but my idea is a bit different. In time, I want to create something similar to roadmap.sh but for Platform Engineers.

This picture is from my DevOpsDay Amsterdam 2024 talk - Platform Engineering's Inferno - you can find a video here.

I want this roadmap to be useful to the largest amount of people and if you want to help you are very welcome. Any contribution matters, may that be an input, a feedback or a PR.

Note: This repo also contains a Platform Engineering Manifesto which is playfully inspired by the Agile Manifesto.

Individual

YAML

YAML (not even kidding you have to learn YAML. It's everywhere and it is the first thing to learn)

Programming

Programming languages (Python, Golang, Typescript) - you don't necessarily need to be a master at these but it helps a ton
Version control (Git)
SDKs

Linux

Bash scripting
Navigating the filesystem
Understand and manipulate both RAM and disk
Understand and manipulate processes
Understand cgroups and resource utilization
Security (SELinux)
Package management
- rip
- yum
- dnf

Network

Protocols
- TCP/IP vs UDP
- HTTP (http1 vs http2)
- TLS/SSL
- HTTPS
- DNS
- SSH
Navigate and troubleshoot network
DNS
DHCP
Firewall (Iptables)
ISO-OSI model
Network topologies
Discoverability
Load Balacing
Proxy and reverse-proxy

Distributed systems and datastores

Queues
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- SQS
- ActiveMQ
- Event Log vs. Message Queue
- Load balancer
  - Load distribution concepts
  - Layer 4 vs. layer 7 load balancer
APIs
- Stateful vs. stateless
- REST
- Microservices: pros and cons
- GraphQL
- gRPC
Caching and key-value stores
- etcd
- Valkey / Redis
- Memcached
- In-memory databases
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Cloudflare
- Akamai
- Fastly
Databases
- Types of databases
  - NoSQL vs. Relational databases
    - MongoDB
  - Relational vs. Document-based
  - Column-oriented databases (OLAP)
    - ClickHouse
  - Graph databases
  - Vector databases
  - Objects-based storage
- ACID principles
- CAP Theorem
- Indexing
- Transaction
- Storage

DevOps

DevOps Concepts
- Culture over tools
- Feedback loops
- Effective communication
- Continuous improvement
- Toolchain
- Pipelines
- Automated testing
- Everything as -Ops (NetOps, DBOps, DocOps...)
Cloud
- SaaS
- PaaS
- IaaS
- Serverless
  - Knative
  - Vendor-specific services to deploy serverless apps
Environments
- Purpose of environments
- Isolation
- Multitenancy vs single tenancy
CI/CD
- Vendor-specific services offering CI/CD capabilities
- SOPS
  - Cloud Specific tools
  - Hashicorp Vault
- GitOps
  - ArgoCD
  - FluxCD
  - Temporal.io
IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
- Configuration management
  - Ansible
  - Puppet
  - Chef
- Provisioning and management
- Open-Tofu
- Terraform
- Pulumi
- CloudFormation (AWS proprietary)
- Bicep (Azure proprietary)
Cloud Providers
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
Version Control Products
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Bitbucket

Rollout

Concepts
- Bake time
- Feature flag
- Feature freeze
- Rollout supervision
Rollout types
- Blue green rollout
- Canary rollout
- Progressive rollout
- Shadow rollout

Observability

Concepts
- Difference between telemetry, monitoring and observability
- Trace vs. metric vs. log
- APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
- Percentiles
Alerting
- ChatOps
- Slow vs. fast burn alert
Log Management
- Levels
- Rotation
- Aggregation
- Retention
Tools
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- Datadog
- New Relic
- Jaeger
- Sumo Logic
- Fluentd
- OpsGenie
- PagerDuty

Security

Encryption
- Algorithms
- Certificates
- TLS
- PKI
- Signatures
Authentication
Authorization
IAM (Identity Access Management)
- OPA (Open Policy Agent)
DevSecOps
- SAST
- DAST
Container scanning
Threat detection
CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform)
CDR

Site Reliability

Concepts
- Hard vs. soft dependencies in a system
- Scalability
  - Concepts
Requests
- Rate limiting
- Throughput
Practices
- Chaos engineering

Cloud Native

Containers
- Docker
- Tags
- OCI (Open Container Initiative)
- Container registry
Container runtime
- Containerd
- CRI-O (Container Runtime Interface - Orchestrator)
Container orchestration
Kubernetes
- Nodes
- Control plane
- etcd
- kubectl
- Namespaces
- Pods
- Scheduler
- Health checks
- Liveness probes vs readiness probes
- Replica sets
- Deployments
- Services
- Ingress
- ConfigMaps
- Helm vs Kustomize
- Secrets
- DaemonSets
- Init containers & sidecar pattern
- eBPF and Kernel-level software
- StatefulSets
- Storage classes
- Persistent volumes and claims
- CSI (Container Storage Interface)
- CNI (Container Network Interface)
  - Cilium
- ClusterIP vs. NodePort vs. LoadBalancer
- Service Meshes
  - Linkerd
  - Istio
- Network policies
- Service accounts
- RBAC (Role-based access control)
- Jobs & CronJobs
- HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler)
- VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler)
- Cluster Autoscaler
- Node scaling
  - Karpenter
- Pod Disruption Budgets
- Resource quotas
- Limit ranges
- Taints and tolerations
- Node affinity
- Pod affinity vs pod anti-affinity
- Pod security policies
- Admission controllers
- Operators
- CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions)
CNCF Landscape

Platform Engineering

Concepts
- Internal Development Platform
- Platform Capability
- Platform Catalog
- Golden Paths
- Self-service Platforms
- Platform as a Product
- DevEx (Developer Experience or UX for developers)
- OMF (Platform Market Fit)
- Platform ROI (Return On Investment)
Internal Developer Platforms
- Backstage the OSS version is a builder of IDPs, not and IDP per se
- Mia Platform
- Humanitec
- Port
- Portainer
- Upbound
- Northflank
- Qovery

Soft skills

Being a nice person to work with (no, really it's important)
Communication
- Written
- Oral
- Presentation skills
Collaboration
Problem solving
Curiosity
Navigating ambiguity
Blameless retrospectives

Company

For a company to be successful in the long run, it needs to have a strong engineering culture. This is a list of things that can help to build such a culture.

mbianchidev/platform-engineering-roadmap