The Journey: From Cloud Complexity to Platformisation#

Joao Pedro Milhome, Alberto Viana (RNP)

• Why: A candid platform-engineering story: adopting containers and cloud tooling made RNP's service delivery more complex, not less — a failure mode most cloud platform teams will recognize.
• What: RNP's response is an Internal Developer Platform organized around four pillars (Speed, Safety, Efficiency, Scalability), treating the platform as a product with golden paths that reduce cognitive load while leaving flexibility for service teams. The slides narrate the diagnosis: fragmented tools, inconsistent environments, split responsibilities, and days spent configuring plumbing instead of writing code.
• How: Paved roads as product strategy — the safe, observable path is made the easiest path; declarative intent replaces manual fulfillment (their database-provisioning example); observability and security are built into the road rather than being separate ticket queues.
• Where applicable: NREN service-organization context (small expert teams, public-interest services, governance requirements), but the platform-as-product approach is the standard enterprise pattern applied honestly — useful as validation rather than novelty.