Golden Path Service Template. @golden-path-template

Ask three teams to start a service and you get three CI configurations, three logging conventions, and three answers to every security question — divergence that compounds into operational cost forever. The Golden Path Service Template sprint builds the alternative: a production-grade service starter encoding your approved architecture, pipeline, observability, and security decisions, generated in minutes through scaffolding.

The finish state is the template in real use — at least one production-bound service generated from it — and a maintenance model so the template evolves instead of rotting: template updates flow to existing services deliberately, and the golden path stays the easiest path. Teams adopt it because starting from it beats starting from blank.

Approved Service Architecture

A reference service structure for your stack — framework choices, configuration handling, API conventions, testing layout — decided once with your senior engineers and encoded.

CI/CD & Quality Gates Built In

Pipeline-as-code included in every generated service: build, test, scanning, and deployment through your paved road, with quality gates present from the first commit.

Observability & Security Defaults

Structured logging, metrics, tracing hooks, health endpoints, dependency scanning, and secrets handling — correct by default rather than retrofitted.

Scaffolding & Template Maintenance

Generator tooling that stamps out new services with the right names, ownership metadata, and wiring — plus versioning and an update path for services already generated.

1. Scope — Audit existing services for the patterns worth blessing; fix the architecture decisions and default set with your engineers.
2. Build — Build template and scaffolding, then prove them by generating a real service a team takes toward production.
3. Handover — Hand over template ownership, contribution and update processes, and documentation for the decisions encoded.

The Golden Path Service Template is a menu item on the Scrums.com delivery catalog, available at every plan tier. Add it to your plan backlog and your delivery team schedules it like any other item — scoped, tracked, and reported through the SEOP. See Delivery Plan Tiers.

One template or one per stack?

Start with the stack most new services use — one excellent template beats three mediocre ones. The scaffolding is built so a second stack template is an increment, not a second project.

How do we stop the template going stale?

Ownership and process, both delivered: a named owning team, versioned releases, and a defined path for propagating updates. A template without an owner is just documentation with extra steps.

Does this require an internal developer platform?

No — the template stands alone on your existing CI/CD. It slots naturally into the Internal Developer Platform Starter's provisioning flow if you have or add one.