Golden Paths: Building process architectures for software

What is a Golden Path?

A Golden Path (sometimes referred to as a paved road or a paved path) is an opinionated, well-defined, task-specific, and supported path for creating software. If a team can stay on the Golden Path, it allows the development process to proceed more smoothly. Golden Paths enable organizations to build better software and deliver it to production faster, with higher quality and greater control. Different teams within an organization often use a wide array of tools, frameworks, and languages. Developers often spend too much time searching for the right technology—and learning how to use it—and not enough time making great software.

This approach leads to a fragmented ecosystem of tools, frameworks and documentation, increased cognitive load, and an inconsistent level of expertise and knowledge. A Golden Path offers a supported approach with well-defined tooling, processes, and approaches for building and deploying software. It typically incorporates cloud native technologies including Kubernetes, CI/CD, DevOps, and DevSecOps. Sticking to defined tools and processes and building “golden path software” can boost developer productivity and decrease time to value.

By carefully defining and supporting frameworks, tooling, best practices and more, a Golden Path can:

1. Improve expertise. Provide a developer-centric view of the end-to-end software development process. Providing the right tools ensures developers aren't constantly searching for something they can adapt to get the job done.
2. Reduce developer toil. Lower cognitive load by abstracting away the complexity of infrastructure, tooling, terminology, processes, and people.

Golden Path development offers value through:

1. Discovery and learning. Clearly delineated goals and step-by-step tutorials with best practices baked in help with onboarding new team members and learning about available and preferred tools and services.
2. Creating and iterating. Build applications using shareable templates and accelerators that help developers navigate through chaos. Easily discoverable and reusable services and documentation is foundational for a Golden Path to establish consistency and transparency.
3. Integrating and deploying. Enable automation and self-service using tools such as CI/CD pipelines, API management, or containers.
4. Improved operations. Gain visibility and expanded depth through monitoring and observability. Manage an application's behavior before it reaches production with features like metrics, traces, and logs.

Golden Paths and Paved Roads

The concept of a Golden Path in software development was originally developed by Spotify to help their engineers navigate the growing complexity of cloud native infrastructure and to quell what they referred to as “rumor-driven development”. A Spotify Golden Path offers options for tooling and services, as well as a roadmap for IT teams containing tutorials, documentation, and best practices. (For sci-fi fans, the term “Golden Path” was derived from Frank Herbert’s classic, Children of Dune.) A Netflix Paved Road is a similar approach that incorporates a combination of culture and tooling to standardize development practices.

How to design a Golden Path

Following a Golden Path consolidates best practices and reduces decision-making. Every business that builds and deploys software—telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, or manufacturing—can benefit from defining Golden Paths. What you include in your Golden Path, however, can vary depending on your business and objectives.

Designing a Golden Path consists of the following steps:

• Step 1: Define your goals
• Step 2: Identify your target audience
• Step 3: Research the best practices
• Step 4: Choose your tools
• Step 5: Create a prototype
• Step 6: Document everything
• Step 7: Get feedback and iterate

Each Golden Path is a living artifact that responds to user feedback and changes as technology evolves. Even though Golden Paths eliminate complexity, they should still offer some freedom to deviate within the path or allow for extensibility, letting developers use a favored tool or approach for situations that demand it.

What to keep in mind when considering Golden Paths

A Golden Path enables organizations to consolidate knowledge and best practices, facilitate onboarding of new team members, and increase sharing and discovery between teams. This leads to increased automation and innovation, faster, more secure software production, and an improved developer experience (DevX).

Golden Paths at VMware

Tanzu is committed to help organizations accelerate the pace of software development, improve quality, and reduce toil. We offer a range of products and services that will help you better leverage existing Golden Paths or create new ones.

Tanzu Application Platform is a single, end-to-end, integrated solution that enables companies to build and deploy more software, more quickly and securely, through a rich set of developer tooling and pre-paved Golden Paths to production. Tanzu Application Platform utilizes Backstage to improve developer experience.

Tanzu Labs can help teams turbocharge their application modernization efforts and provide advice on defining Golden Paths that will serve the needs of your software teams and your business.

Tanzu Observability offers customized and out-of-the-box dashboards for applications that bring together metrics, traces, and log management, simplifying full-stack visibility for multi-cloud environments.

Developing Golden Paths for Spring applications

VMware and Microsoft have partnered to make Azure Spring Apps a Golden Path for deploying and scaling Spring applications in the cloud. With Azure Spring Apps, you can deploy event-driven Spring applications to the cloud and get them up and running in no time. It is a Golden Path to production that simplifies the deployment process and optimizes resource usage.