Developer pillar tips

Platform engineering and enablement checklists

The following actions blend Zeph Tech research with guidance from CNCF, GitHub, Google, and major compliance frameworks so developer platforms stay secure and productive.

Roll these tips into backlog refinement, runbooks, and executive scorecards.

Platform engineering foundations

  • Publish golden paths documented in CNCF’s Platform Engineering Maturity Model—cover provisioning, observability, and deployment workflows with self-service guardrails.
  • Operate platforms as products with quarterly roadmaps, SLAs, and customer feedback loops tied to product management practices.
  • Instrument usage telemetry (onboarding times, deployment frequency, rollback rates) and share with stakeholders to prioritise backlog items.
  • Align platform OKRs with business outcomes such as release frequency, incident reduction, and developer satisfaction surveys.

Secure software delivery

  • Adopt NIST SP 800-218 SSDF controls across planning, coding, testing, and deployment—ensure pipelines enforce peer review, automated testing, and separation of duties.
  • Enable GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps or GitHub.com to provide CodeQL, dependency, and secret scanning with remediation SLAs tied to SOC 2 CC7.1.
  • Sign builds with Sigstore or equivalent solutions to meet SLSA Level 3 expectations and satisfy U.S. government software attestation requirements.
  • Maintain SBOMs in SPDX or CycloneDX format for every release; integrate automated vulnerability checks before publishing artifacts.

Developer enablement

  • Run monthly workshops on new tooling (Copilot, CodeQL, infrastructure-as-code) with recorded sessions and follow-up labs.
  • Create internal documentation portals that mirror public API references, using automated docs-as-code pipelines.
  • Establish champion networks across product groups to pilot new workflows and relay friction to platform teams.
  • Track enablement metrics such as time-to-first-success for new developers and survey-based satisfaction scores.

Observability and reliability

  • Adopt OpenTelemetry across services, instrumenting traces, metrics, and logs with consistent naming conventions.
  • Set service level objectives following Google SRE principles; automate error budget tracking and feed results into release gating.
  • Run game days simulating dependency failures, API degradations, and region outages with post-incident review templates.
  • Centralise incident knowledge using blameless postmortems that document contributing factors, customer impact, and corrective actions.

Analytics & reporting

  • Dashboard DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate) and annotate major initiatives that influence trends.
  • Share automated compliance evidence (code review records, pipeline logs, access attestations) with risk teams for PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO/IEC 27001 support.
  • Correlate developer productivity data with customer outcomes, balancing automation investments with support load and revenue impact.
  • Provide executive readouts summarising platform health, backlog burn-down, and capacity requirements for upcoming quarters.