Paved Road
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A paved road is Netflix's version of a golden path — the well-maintained, easy route that most teams should take. It's not mandatory, but going off-road means you're on your own. The platform team maintains the road; you just drive.
Real Talk
Netflix's term for their supported, standardized approach to common engineering tasks. Paved roads are maintained by platform teams and provide batteries-included solutions for CI/CD, deployment, monitoring, and security. Unlike mandates, paved roads are chosen because they're easier, not because they're required.
When You'll Hear This
"The paved road for logging uses our centralized ELK stack — you can use something else but you'll support it yourself." / "We build paved roads, not walled gardens — teams can go off-road, but the road is usually better."
Related Terms
Convention Over Configuration
Convention Over Configuration means frameworks make assumptions about what you want so you write less config.
Golden Path
A Golden Path is the recommended, well-supported way to do something in your organization. Need a new service? Follow the Golden Path template.
Internal Developer Platform
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is the self-service layer that lets developers deploy, monitor, and manage their apps without bugging the ops team.
Platform Team
A Platform Team builds internal tools and infrastructure so product teams can ship faster.