The Platform Engineer's Handbook: Build secure, developer-focused platforms that streamline modern software delivery - Paperback

by Ajay Chankramath (Author), Angelic Gibson (Foreword by)

Deliver developer-friendly infrastructure with automation, AI acceleration, and real-world platform patterns all built from scratch on your laptop

Key Features:

- Hands-on guide to designing, deploying, and evolving engineering platforms with real-world patterns

- Focus on developer experience, enabling self-service, scalability, and AI augmentation from day one

- Built for practitioners offering step-by-step, practical knowledge for shaping modern delivery

- Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description:

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.

What You Will Learn:

- Build a scalable, developer-focused engineering platform MVP

- Enable self-service onboarding and app deployment

- Create golden paths with reusable CI/CD workflows

- Scaffold new projects with portal-based starter kits

- Automate secure access with OAuth and RBAC

- Publish services to a centralized developer portal

- Deliver platform features with AI-augmented tooling

- Scale platform services without disrupting users

Who this book is for:

This book is intended for intermediate to senior software engineers and DevOps professionals with prior experience in cloud-native software development patterns and practices who are interested in learning how to build secure, scalable engineering platforms to accelerate software delivery and the why behind it.

Table of Contents

- Platform Engineering: Laying the Groundwork

- Scalable Platform Runtime with Kubernetes and Service Mesh

- Securing Platform Access

- Embedding Observability

- Evaluate the User Experience

- Accelerating DevEx: Deploying and Curating Your First Developer Portal

- Self-Service Platform Onboarding

- CI/CD as a Platform Service

- Self-Service Infrastructure Management

- Publishing Starter Kits

- Validating Compliance with Policy-as-Code

- Optimize Cost, Performance, and Scalability

- Resilience Automation

- Agentic and AI-Augmented Platforms