The Real Discipline of Platform Engineering: Batteries Included, but Replaceable
Why the best enterprise platforms win not by saying “no,” but by making the right path the easiest one to follow.
You hear the phrase a lot in platform circles:
“Batteries included, but replaceable.”
It’s more than a catchphrase. It’s a guiding principle — especially for large enterprises, where the sheer scale of thousands of developers and hundreds of workloads makes a rigid platform a bottleneck, and a chaotic one a security risk.
This middle ground is where real platform discipline lives.
🧭 What It Really Means
“Batteries included” means your platform comes with sensible, supportable defaults:
Pre-approved base images
Standard logging and monitoring
Templates for AI workflows or backend services
Opinionated security controls
But “replaceable” means you’re not blocking innovation. You’re acknowledging edge cases and offering a well-lit off-ramp — not a hard “no.”
⚙️ It’s About Contract, Not Control
This isn’t about enforcing standards through brute force. It’s about saying:
“Here’s the fastest, safest, most supportable way to ship — but if you need something different, you’re responsible for more of the lifecycle.”
That distinction — contract over control — is the backbone of a sustainable platform.
🧱 What It Means to “Own” More of the Lifecycle
Going off the golden path doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It just means you’ve stepped out of the paved zone, and you’re now accountable for things the platform usually abstracts:
Configuration and provisioning
Monitoring and logging
Backup, recovery, and durability
Scaling and performance tuning
Security posture and compliance
Ongoing patching and upgrades
🛠️ Real-World Example: Persistent Storage
Say your platform offers EBS-backed volumes, provisioned with Terraform, fully integrated with backup policies and encryption defaults.
Your team wants to run a high-performance Cassandra cluster on local SSDs. Valid use case — but now you’re on the hook for:
Storage provisioning
Custom backup/recovery processes
Observability integration
Access controls and encryption enforcement
DR posture
Support during a 2AM incident
You’ve gone off-template. That’s your call. But it also means the platform team isn’t in your escalation path — and that’s fair.
🎯 The Strategic Upside
This model enables:
Fast onboarding through paved paths
Lower operational risk via known-good defaults
Flexibility for edge cases without polluting the core
A transparent contract between builders and platform teams
💬 Final Thought
This isn’t about compromise. It’s about building a platform that behaves like a product — one that makes the right choice easy, and every other choice an informed one.