Teams resist standards when they arrive as mandates from architects they never meet. Standards stick when they remove toil — pre-approved patterns, automated provisioning, and clear escape hatches for genuine exceptions.
We standardise the parts that hurt when they vary: network layout, logging format, identity integration, and backup policy. We leave application code and UX choices to product teams.
Version and sunset
Every standard needs an owner and a review date. Deprecated patterns should fail CI with a link to the replacement — not linger in Confluence while new projects copy old templates.
Measure adoption by conformance rate and incident correlation — do non-standard deployments generate disproportionate tickets? That evidence funds the next standardisation sprint better than architecture principles alone.
Start with one landing zone for new workloads. Grandfather legacy exceptions with remediation dates rather than pretending everything will migrate overnight.
Standardisation reduces cognitive load for application teams and auditors alike — but must leave a governed path for genuine innovation, not shadow IT.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should be standardised first?
Identity, network landing zones, logging, and backup policies — the primitives every workload inherits.
How do paved roads avoid stagnation?
Versioned patterns with deprecation timelines; labs for preview services outside production guardrails.
Who owns the platform roadmap?
A dedicated platform product owner with architecture and security in the backlog prioritisation forum.
When is custom architecture justified?
When regulatory, latency, or legacy constraints cannot be met by paved road — documented as ADR with review date.