Running the platform
For Platform and CI engineers who own the Buildkite estate
The complete Platform Engineer module set, in the order the material builds.
Topology comes first because everything else inherits it — the queue boundaries you draw in the first module are the secrets boundaries in the second and the capacity story in the fourth.
This path is preparation for the [Platform Engineer exam](/tracks/platform-engineer), which is assessed by doing the work in a real organisation rather than by writing about it. The hands-on units use the same mechanism, so they are genuine preparation.
Modules, in order
The cluster → queue → agent hierarchy, and how a step ends up on the machine you intended.
Keeping credentials out of pipelines, and constraining what a job is allowed to load.
Who can change what, who did change what, and the risks that arrive from outside the organisation.
Telling a capacity problem apart from a gate, a gate apart from a person, and knowing which one you actually have.