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📑 Contents

• Quick Start
• Local Development
• What is Platform Engineering?
• Key Components
• Learning & Certification
• Contributing

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🏢 About

Created by Kevin Evans and the Code to Cloud community. What started as a personal learning journey has grown into a comprehensive resource for platform engineering teams.

"It's all in the reflexes." — Jack Burton

Focus Areas: Platform Engineering \u00b7 DevSecOps \u00b7 Cloud-Native Development

This project uses free, community, and open-source software only.

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🚀 Quick Start

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/codetocloudorg/platform-engineering
Open in GitHub Codespaces (recommended)
or use the included devcontainer in VS Code

| Step | Description | |------|-------------| | 📖 Learn | What is Platform Engineering? | | 🏗️ Explore | Reference Architectures | | 🛠️ Build | Development Setup | | 🎓 Certify | Certification Paths |

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💻 Local Development

Set up a fully configured local development environment with cloud-native tools.

| Environment | Description | Link | |-------------|-------------|------| | 🐧 Kodra | Ubuntu desktop with Ghostty, VS Code, and 30+ tools | kodra.codetocloud.io | | 🪟 Kodra WSL | Windows + WSL2 with Docker CE and Azure tooling | kodra.wsl.codetocloud.io | | ☁️ Codespaces | Browser-based dev environment using this repo | Open in Codespaces |

The devcontainer in this repo includes: Terraform, OpenTofu, Dagger, Azure CLI, Bicep, and Docker.

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🌐 What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering builds on DevOps principles to enhance security, compliance, cost efficiency, and time-to-value by improving developer experiences and enabling self-service within a secure, governed framework.

It’s both a mindset shift and a set of tools and systems designed to reduce friction in development. Well-designed platforms eliminate toil by streamlining developer workflows and simplifying operations. These platforms include tools that:

• Empower developers with self-service options (e.g., starter kits, IDE plugins)
• Automate common tasks
• Encapsulate best practices into reusable components
• Provide early feedback on issues like security risks
• Manage infrastructure and tools to simplify operations

This approach enables development teams to focus on building and delivering value efficiently.

🚀 Why Platform Engineering?

In today's fast-paced tech environment, organizations need to innovate quickly while maintaining high standards of reliability and security. Platform Engineering addresses these needs by:

• 🚀 Accelerating Development: Providing developers with easy access to the tools and environments they need, reducing the time spent on setup and configuration.
• 🔒 Enhancing Security: Implementing consistent security practices across the platform, ensuring compliance and protecting sensitive data.
• 📈 Improving Reliability: Standardizing infrastructure and processes to reduce errors and increase system stability.
• 💡 Fostering Innovation: Enabling teams to experiment and iterate rapidly by providing a flexible and scalable platform.

🛠️ Platform Tooling Landscape

The platform engineering tooling landscape is rapidly evolving, encompassing a wide range of technologies that streamline developer workflows, enhance automation, and improve infrastructure management. This includes:

• Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools
• GitOps workflows
• Service meshes
• Cloud-native runtime environments

For a deeper dive into the current state of platform engineering and its tooling ecosystem, check out this overview:

• Platform Engineering Landscape Overview 🚀

🔑 Key Components

| Category | Resources | |----------|----------| | Infrastructure | IaC · CI/CD · Kubernetes · Cloud-Native | | Developer Experience | Codespaces · IDPs · Automation | | Operations | Observability · Security · AI Infra |

🏗️ Reference Architecture

Standardized frameworks for building scalable, secure IDPs with IaC, GitOps, Kubernetes, and self-service portals.

• Azure Reference Architecture
• OpenShift Reference Architecture

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🎓 Learning & Certification

• Certification Pathways
• Platform Engineering Landscape
• Getting Started Guide
• FAQ
• Glossary

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📚 Guides & Comparisons

• Platform Engineering vs DevOps
• IDP Comparison — Backstage vs Port vs Cortex
• IaC Comparison — Terraform vs OpenTofu vs Bicep vs Pulumi
• Architecture Guide
• Roadmap

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions welcome! Open issues, submit PRs, or review our contributing guide.

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