The Platform Engineer's Handbook

The Platform Engineer’s Handbook equips senior engineers and DevOps professionals to deliver developer-friendly infrastructure with automation, speed, AI acceleration, and intelligence. Starting with a blank slate, you’ll build a complete, modern platform that runs locally on your laptop, learning real-world patterns as you go. In this handbook, you’ll follow a structured, progressive journey, beginning with source control governance and branching strategies, then deploying a Kubernetes-based runtime, embedding observability, and securing platform access. You’ll implement self-service onboarding, CI/CD as a service, and developer portals with Backstage. Later chapters introduce infrastructure blueprints, policy as code, FinOps observability, and AI-augmented platform services such as agent-based onboarding and copilots for pipeline creation. Each chapter combines core concepts, lab-based exercises, and production-ready best practices to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. By the end, you'll have a working MVP platform and the skills to adapt and scale it for your team or organization.