How GitHub engineers tackle platform problems

A GitHub platform engineer shares best practices for tackling infrastructure problems, drawing an analogy between product engineers and platform engineers using Gundam model building.

• •Understanding your domain is essential: talk to neighboring teams, investigate old issues, and read documentation to grasp technical terminology and system interactions
• •Platform engineers need deeper knowledge in networks (TCP, UDP, L4 load balancing), operating systems, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, Consul), and distributed systems
• •Knowledge sharing prevents lost institutional knowledge, accelerates problem resolution, and improves customer success
• •Impact radius awareness is critical for platform teams: even minor DNS changes can affect services from GitHub Pages to GitHub Copilot, requiring postmortems and monitoring
• •Testing in distributed environments should use dedicated test sites, cover IaC provisioning/deprovisioning, E2E traffic testing, and self-healing validation before h