architecture-design-principleslisted

# Architecture & Design Principles — Platform Engineering at Scale A field-tested distillation of how to build a developer platform that serves ~1000 services across ~13 regions on ~2000 long-lived proxies, derived from an 8-year platform-engineering retrospective (Atlassian, 2017-2025). The talk is structured as a chronological build-up; this skill re-organises it as a **principle map** plus deep-dive references. ## Why this skill exists Platform-engineering content online tends toward two failure modes: 1. **Vendor demos** that show the happy path of a tool without the failure modes that emerged at year three. 2. **Conference talks** that describe a finished system without the sequence of decisions that produced it. This talk is unusual because it walks chronologically through *how* a small team built a self-service load-balancing platform, *which choices compounded*, and *which non-technical skills mattered most over eight years*. The principles below are the durable shape of that experience. ## Principle Map (with canonical grounding) Each principle is anchored to its canonical name in the established literature. Use the canonical name in PRs and code review; reviewers can verify against the cited source. Detailed grounding lives in [`references/06-canon-and-citations.md`](references/06-canon-and-citations.md); the canonical/novel/controversial breakdown lives in [`references/07-contrasts.md`](references/07-contrasts.md). | # | Principle | Canonical name |