AWS & Platform Engineering
Engineering approach
Good infrastructure decisions account for the people who will change, operate, and recover the system. These principles offer a practical framework for weighing those decisions.
Keep systems understandable
Complexity needs a concrete reason: a workload requirement, a security boundary, or a delivery constraint. The cost includes the effort to debug, upgrade, and recover each component.
Decision check: Can the team explain how this works and what to do when it fails? Kubernetes can be a useful platform choice when its capabilities justify the operational work.
Make changes reviewable and recoverable
Terraform and CI/CD make changes repeatable. Safe delivery also needs a clear scope, appropriate access, checks before rollout, and a recovery path.
Decision check: What can this change affect, how will failure be detected, and how will service be restored? Data and state changes may need a recovery plan beyond redeploying an earlier version.
Connect signals to action
Observability should help answer practical questions: what is failing, who is affected, and where to investigate. An alert needs an owner and a useful response.
Decision check: Would this signal change an operational decision? Page for problems that need prompt intervention; keep diagnostic detail available for investigation.
Make tradeoffs explicit
AWS and platform choices balance reliability, security, cost, and team capacity. A useful decision record captures the constraints, alternatives, and reasons for the choice.
Decision check: What would make this decision worth revisiting? Record that trigger so the next engineer can distinguish an intentional compromise from an overlooked problem.