Building a robust platform on serverless extends beyond mere infrastructure; it's about creating a powerful integration platform, treated as a product for consumers including other engineering teams in the organization. We'll explore why this approach dramatically improves engineering efficiency, emphasizing "paved paths" while carefully avoiding over-generalization pitfalls. Adopting a deeply consumer-centric mindset from day one is crucial. We'll discuss how to engage diverse stakeholders through RFCs and collaborative input, avoiding the trap of building only for the initial use case.

For running such a platform, we'll delve into critical operational considerations: implementing comprehensive security measures (user/M2M authorization, egress control), managing Total Cost of Ownership per consumer, and ensuring operational excellence. This includes robust CI/CD, observability, versioning strategies for code, APIs, and data, and building highly reliable, performant systems (addressing cold starts and concurrency). Finally, we'll cover fostering a culture of velocity to empower teams and prevent the emergence of costly "shadow” platforms.