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Reading paths by role

Pick the list that matches your role and read it top to bottom. Each list starts with orientation, moves to the mechanism, and ends with the pages you will return to. Every path assumes you have read what is BuiltForProd and key concepts.

Buyer or engineering leader​

Your question is whether your organization can reliably operate what it is building, and what it costs to get there.

  1. What is BuiltForProd, including the fit table and the self-assessment
  2. The BuiltForProd Standard
  3. Baseline, Blueprints and Managed
  4. Shared responsibility model
  5. Purchasing and licensing
  6. Support tiers and service level agreements
  7. Billing FAQ and general FAQ

Architect​

You want the shape of the system and the reasoning behind it.

  1. Architecture overview
  2. Landing zones and hub-and-spoke networking
  3. Defense in depth and least privilege
  4. Environments and promotion
  5. The eight pillars, starting with Secure and Reliable
  6. AWS services used, then the explainers for AWS Organizations, Transit Gateway and IPAM
  7. AWS Baseline overview and the three blueprint overviews

Platform engineer​

You will own the landing zone repository.

  1. Infrastructure as code and OpenTofu and Terraform
  2. Terragrunt units and stacks
  3. Architecture overview
  4. Prerequisites, for the decisions that cannot be changed cheaply
  5. Automated, Scalable and Operable
  6. Drift and policy as code
  7. Release notes, versioning policy and upgrade guides
  8. The explainers for Terragrunt, GitHub Actions, GitHub OIDC, Checkov, Trivy and tflint and pre-commit

Developer​

You build the application and want to know how a commit reaches production.

  1. Blueprints and the Web App Blueprint overview
  2. GitOps and immutable artifacts
  3. Environments and promotion
  4. Least privilege, for what your permission set allows in each stage
  5. The explainers for EKS, ArgoCD, Helm, External Secrets Operator, ECR and Docker
  6. Secrets Blueprint overview and the SOPS explainer
  7. Technical FAQ

Data engineer​

You build pipelines on the data platform.

  1. Blueprints and the Data and ETL Blueprint overview
  2. Environments and promotion
  3. Immutable artifacts, for how the Lambda image tag is tracked
  4. The explainers for S3, Glue, Lake Formation, Athena, Lambda and X-Ray
  5. Least privilege
  6. Technical FAQ

Security reviewer​

You are answering a questionnaire or reviewing the design before purchase.

  1. Security posture summary
  2. Secure and Compliant
  3. Defense in depth, least privilege and policy as code
  4. The explainers for service control policies, IAM Identity Center, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail and WAF
  5. Privacy and data handling
  6. Security FAQ

Auditor​

You need evidence, and to know where it comes from.

  1. Compliant
  2. Observable, for the audit trail and its retention
  3. Security posture summary
  4. The explainers for AWS Config, CloudTrail, Security Hub and Access Analyzer
  5. Shared responsibility model
  6. Security FAQ

Operator​

You are on call for the platform.

  1. Operable, Observable and Recoverable
  2. Drift
  3. Environments and promotion, for rollback
  4. The explainers for CloudWatch, CloudWatch OAM, SNS, EventBridge, Client VPN and Fluent Bit
  5. Contacting support and SLA definitions
  6. Support FAQ

Every path ends at the BuiltForProd Standard, because that is what the platform is measured against.