Nobody arrives asking for golden paths
Every repo is a snowflake. We keep rebuilding the same pipeline. We have no idea which services have scanning turned on. Onboarding takes a month.
- A new service took three weeks to get to production, and most of that was plumbing.
- A security finding traced back to a repo nobody had wired scanning into.
- An audit asked which services enforce which controls, and the answer took a week to assemble.
- A team joined through acquisition or growth and rebuilt CI from scratch, differently.
- The platform team of two is drowning in tickets for things that should be self-service.
- Agent-generated pull requests went up and the review queue stopped coping.
Concrete artifacts, not a recommendation deck
Depending on what the assessment finds, and shipped into your own stack.
Blueprint repos per tech stack
Wired for build, test and deploy from the first commit.
CI stages for your stack
Build, test, lint, scan, package.
A deploy stage
Targeting your Kubernetes cluster.
A universal Helm chart
Parameterised across services, so one chart covers the estate.
Vault integration
A secrets structure that works the same way for every service.
Gates that run every time
Security scanning on every repo, linting on every feature branch.
Assess, build, hand over
We review the stacks in play, the repos, the CI setup, the cluster, the secrets handling and the security gates. It is a real deliverable, not a sales call in disguise, and you can act on it without buying the build.
A written map of the current state, a prioritised list of which paths to pave and in what order, and a scope and price for the build phase.
The artifacts above, delivered into your Git provider, your CI, your cluster and your Vault.
You own what was built and run it without us. Lock-in is the objection this audience raises first, so we answer it here rather than in an FAQ.
A golden path is a set of working artifacts. You can have every one of them without buying or building a platform first.
SDLC Golden Paths
Working artifacts in your own stack. The lighter, cheaper answer, and the right one for most companies at this size.
Internal Developer Platform
The step up, for organisations where self-service itself is the bottleneck. If you need the whole platform, that page is honest about when you do.
The market consensus is that golden paths live inside an internal developer platform. We disagree. For a lot of companies the platform is the expensive way to get the thing they actually wanted — and saying so out loud costs us the bigger sale sometimes.
This is also not a developer portal and not a managed service. Each of those has its own page and its own reason to exist.
Day 50 and Day 500, not Day 1
Most golden-path efforts over-invest in project creation, which is a vanishingly small part of an application’s life, and under-invest in everything that happens afterwards. Ours are weighted to the recurring work: every feature branch gets linted, every repo gets scanned, every deploy goes through the same stage. Twenty years of production operations sit behind the defaults — the chart, the secrets layout and the gates are what we run for people who page us, not what looks tidy in a demo.
Build it in-house
You can, and you have not, because it is nobody’s full-time job and it loses every prioritisation call to shipping features. We do it in weeks because we have done it many times — and then you own it.
Buy an IDP product
A big commitment that does not answer the question. The product is the container; somebody still has to write the paths that go inside it.
A generalist consultancy
Which will learn your stack on your budget.
Nothing
The default, and the most common competitor.
The questions we get asked
Our stack is too bespoke for templates.
Usually half true. The assessment exists precisely to find where you are genuinely unusual and where you only think you are. Most bespoke turns out to be undocumented rather than special.
We tried standardising and the teams ignored it.
The most serious objection, and usually the reason the last attempt failed. A golden path is opinionated and supported, not mandatory. Leaving the path is allowed — you just leave the support behind with it. The aim is that the easy route is also the correct one, not that anyone is made to comply.
Isn’t this just a Backstage project?
No. A portal is a container; this is the content that would go inside one. You can have the content without the container, which is the whole argument of this page.
We would be locked into OpsHero.
Everything ships into your own stack — your Git provider, your CI, your cluster, your Vault — and you own it. There is no OpsHero runtime dependency.
Our platform team could do this.
They could. Then point at the calendar.
Book the assessment
It is a real deliverable. You can act on it without buying the build phase.
- A written map of how software currently gets from commit to production
- A prioritised list of the paths worth paving, and in what order
- A scope and price for the build