Platform engineering
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Applies platform-as-a-product principles and measures developer outcomes.
← All career guides10 of 10 skills92 of 92 courses
Infrastructure and operations
Platform Engineer
Builds and evolves internal platforms that provide secure, reliable self-service capabilities to software teams.
Skill coverage
100%
Course coverage
100%
Skill coverage shows how much of the role's capability map already has a published course. Course coverage shows how much of the mapped course pipeline for this role has shipped.
- Role skills
- 10
- Published coverage
- 10
- Relevant courses
- 92
Capability map
Skills
Importance describes how central each capability is to the role. Course coverage shows where you can build the skill in the current OpenSkills catalog.
Platform engineering: 4 more courses
Internal developer platforms: 1 more course
Developer experience: 7 more courses
Platform APIs: 6 more courses
Container orchestration: 28 more courses
- Cloud Native Networking
- Cloud Native Storage
- Container Images
- Container Networking
- Container Storage
- containerd
- CoreDNS
- CRI-O
- CubeFS
- Dragonfly
- Envoy Proxy Fundamentals
- etcd
- HashiCorp Nomad
- Helm
- Istio Fundamentals
- KEDA
- Knative
- KServe and Kubernetes Model Serving
- KubeEdge
- Kubeflow Pipelines
- Kubernetes Networking
- Kubernetes Scheduling
- Kubernetes Storage
- Kustomize
- Linkerd
- Rook
- Vitess
- OpenShift Fundamentals
Software delivery: 6 more courses
Observability: 5 more courses
Platform security: 11 more courses
Platform Engineer capability map
- Platform Engineer
- Platform product
- Platform capabilities
- Platform APIs
- Container orchestration
- Kubernetes Fundamentals
- Kubernetes Workloads
- Cilium
- +28 more
- Cloud Native Networking
- Cloud Native Storage
- Container Images
- Container Networking
- Container Storage
- containerd
- CoreDNS
- CRI-O
- CubeFS
- Dragonfly
- Envoy Proxy Fundamentals
- etcd
- HashiCorp Nomad
- Helm
- Istio Fundamentals
- KEDA
- Knative
- KServe and Kubernetes Model Serving
- KubeEdge
- Kubeflow Pipelines
- Kubernetes Networking
- Kubernetes Scheduling
- Kubernetes Storage
- Kustomize
- Linkerd
- Rook
- Vitess
- OpenShift Fundamentals
- Software delivery
- Platform operations
01
Platform product
3 capabilities
Internal developer platforms
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Designs cohesive self-service platform capabilities and golden paths.
Developer experience
Importance: Very important (4 of 5)
Reduces cognitive load and friction across software delivery workflows.
02
Platform capabilities
3 capabilities
Platform APIs
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Defines stable, discoverable contracts for platform capabilities.
Container orchestration
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Designs and operates container orchestration as a reusable platform capability.
Course coverage
- Kubernetes FundamentalsFree
- Kubernetes Workloads
- Cilium
- Cloud Native Networking
- Cloud Native Storage
- Container ImagesFree
- Container NetworkingFree
- Container StorageFree
- containerd
- CoreDNS
- CRI-O
- CubeFS
- Dragonfly
- Envoy Proxy Fundamentals
- etcd
- HashiCorp Nomad
- Helm
- Istio Fundamentals
- KEDA
- Knative
- KServe and Kubernetes Model Serving
- KubeEdge
- Kubeflow Pipelines
- Kubernetes Networking
- Kubernetes Scheduling
- Kubernetes Storage
- Kustomize
- Linkerd
- Rook
- Vitess
- OpenShift Fundamentals
Software delivery
Importance: Very important (4 of 5)
Integrates build, release, and deployment workflows into platform capabilities.
03
Platform operations
4 capabilities
Observability
Importance: Very important (4 of 5)
Makes platform behavior and developer-facing service health explainable.
Platform operations
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Manages platform lifecycle, capacity, upgrades, backup, recovery, and incident response.
Course coverage
Platform security
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Builds identity, policy, isolation, secrets, and supply-chain controls into secure platform defaults.
Platform extensibility
Importance: Important (3 of 5)
Extends platform capabilities through APIs, controllers, automation, and reusable abstractions.
Course coverage
Learning path
Relevant courses
Core foundations
The concepts this role is built on.
- Backstage Fundamentals
- Developer ExperienceFree
- Developer Portals
- Internal Developer Platforms
- Kubernetes FundamentalsFree
- Kubernetes Observability
- Kubernetes Operations
- Kubernetes Security
- Kubernetes Workloads
- Platform API Design
- Platform Engineering FundamentalsFree
- Platform Product Management
- Self-Service Infrastructure
Supporting knowledge
Adjacent knowledge that improves day-to-day judgment.
- API DesignFree
- API Gateways
- Argo
- Argo CD
- Argo Events
- Argo Rollouts
- Argo Workflows
- Azure DevOps and Pipelines
- cert-manager
- Cilium
- Claude Code
- Cloud Native Application Design
- Cloud Native Architecture
- Cloud Native Fundamentals
- Cloud Native Networking
- Cloud Native Observability
- Cloud Native Platforms
- Cloud Native Security
- Cloud Native Storage
- CloudEvents
- CNCF Landscape
- Container ImagesFree
- Container NetworkingFree
- Container SecurityFree
- Container StorageFree
- containerd
- Continuous Delivery
- CoreDNS
- CRI-O
- CubeFS
- Cursor
- Dapr
- Disaster RecoveryFree
- Dragonfly
- Envoy Proxy Fundamentals
- etcd
- Falco
- Fluentd
- GitHub Actions
- GitHub Copilot
- GitLab CI/CD
- GitOps Fundamentals
- Goose
- Grafana Loki
- Harbor
- HashiCorp Consul
- HashiCorp Nomad
- Helm
- in-toto
- Istio Fundamentals
- Jaeger
- KEDA
- Keycloak Fundamentals
- Knative
- Kong Gateway
- KServe and Kubernetes Model Serving
- KubeEdge
- Kubeflow Pipelines
- Kubernetes Networking
- Kubernetes Scheduling
- Kubernetes Storage
- Kustomize
- Kyverno
- Linkerd
- Observability FundamentalsFree
- Open Policy Agent
- OpenAI Codex CLI
- OpenTelemetry
- Prometheus Fundamentals
- Rook
- SPIFFE
- SPIRE
- The Update Framework
- Vitess
- Windsurf
Specializations
Deeper paths for particular environments or directions.
HOWTOs
Concrete operational procedures from the courses on this page.
- How to rotate the Consul gossip encryption key
verified on linux-amd64-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-18, sha256:f635f01f2426dc7d8c5153a0bb556f1e585e8d27004bfa0b25cbac3dd61e4913
Replacing the shared Serf gossip key on a running datacenter without partitioning any agent, and what changes when the datacenters are WAN-federated.
HashiCorp Consul
- How to restore a Consul cluster from a Raft snapshot after quorum loss
verified on linux-amd64-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-18, sha256:f635f01f2426dc7d8c5153a0bb556f1e585e8d27004bfa0b25cbac3dd61e4913
Recovering a Consul server cluster that has lost quorum, and where the peers.json Raft rebuild ends and a consul snapshot restore begins.
HashiCorp Consul
- How to bootstrap ACLs on a running Consul cluster without an outage
verified on linux-amd64-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-18, sha256:f635f01f2426dc7d8c5153a0bb556f1e585e8d27004bfa0b25cbac3dd61e4913
Turning on the Consul ACL system on a datacenter that has none without a service-discovery outage, and why the permissive-first, deny-last order matters.
HashiCorp Consul
- How to upgrade a production Kubernetes cluster one minor version
Moving a self-managed kubeadm cluster forward one Kubernetes minor version, including the version-skew rules and pre-flight checks that decide whether the upgrade can proceed at all.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to drain and replace a worker node safely
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Taking a worker node out of service for disruptive work or retirement without breaching any workload's availability guarantee, and returning it or removing it cleanly afterward.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to renew expiring kubeadm control-plane certificates
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Renewing the one-year kubeadm control-plane certificates before they expire, and the offline recovery path for a cluster whose certificates have already lapsed and whose API server is down.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to rebuild a Kubernetes control plane from an etcd snapshot
The last-resort recovery when etcd data is lost or corrupt beyond quorum: replacing entire cluster state from a snapshot, with the data-loss and reconciliation consequences that come with it.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to migrate deprecated Kubernetes API usage before an upgrade
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Clearing an upgrade blocker by locating every client, manifest, and controller still calling a Kubernetes API version the next minor removes, and proving the usage is gone before the upgrade.
Kubernetes Operations
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