How to Balance Paved Road vs Off-Road on a Platform

The paved road should be the easy default; off-road stays possible but is labeled, time-bound, and visible.

Make the supported path frictionless and let teams opt out explicitly. A declared off-road marker keeps exceptions auditable so the platform team knows what it is not supporting.

Steps

• Make the paved road the lowest-effort option (one uses: line).
• Allow opt-out but require an explicit, labeled marker.
• Report off-road services in a scorecard so they are visible.
• Time-box exceptions and revisit them.

Explicit off-road marker

# catalog-info.yaml
metadata:
  annotations:
    my-org/paved-road: "false"
    my-org/off-road-reason: "custom GPU runners, revisit 2026-Q4"

Gotchas

• If off-road is easier than the paved road, teams take it; invest in making the road smooth.
• Track the reason and an expiry so exceptions do not become permanent unsupported forks.

Related guides