Slate
The paved road: one way to create a service, ship it, and observe it — built so that the paved road was genuinely easier than going around it.
Every team had invented its own deployment, and each invention was defensible in isolation. Onboarding an engineer took three weeks, incidents took an archaeologist, and the platform team spent its days as a ticket queue.
Defined a service template with deployment, observability, secrets and CI wired in from the first commit.
Built progressive delivery on top of it — automated canaries, one-command rollback — so shipping stopped being an event.
Deliberately made the golden path the path of least resistance rather than a policy, and let the migration happen team by team.
“The paved road won because it was faster, not because anyone mandated it.”
2 days
New service to production, from three weeks
11×
Deploy frequency after nine months
−40%
Time to restore during incidents
A service template four teams adopted without being asked.
Rollback as one command, rehearsed in a game day.
A platform team doing platform work instead of ticket triage.
Meridian
A nine-year-old monolith taken apart while it kept trading. No feature freeze.
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