nw-platform-engineering-foundations

nw-platform-engineering-foundations is a skill for Claude Code from nWave-ai/nWave. It costs 47 tokens per session (912 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide to platform engineering ideas from continuous delivery, site reliability engineering, team design, and chaos engineering. It explains concepts such as deployment stages, reliability targets, error budgets, and delivery metrics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to ground decisions about CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, reliability targets, DORA metrics, team ownership, and controlled failure testing.
Why use it?
It gives teams shared definitions and principles when designing or reviewing software platforms. This helps connect delivery speed, reliability, operational work, and risk management.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-platform-engineering-foundations
Any agent
npx skills add nWave-ai/nWave --skill nw-platform-engineering-foundations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nWave-ai/nWave

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for nw-platform-engineering-foundations

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-platform-engineering-foundations.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-platform-engineering-foundations)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-platform-engineering-foundations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nwave-ai/nwave/nw-platform-engineering-foundations.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 912 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00047 $0.00912
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00456
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00182
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00091

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6fb02ea4c3f7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

nw-platform-engineering-foundations scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

nWave/skills/nw-platform-engineering-foundations/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Platform Engineering Foundations

Continuous Delivery (Humble and Farley)

Key principles: Build quality in | Work in small batches | Automate almost everything | Pursue continuous improvement | Everyone is responsible (shared ownership).

Pipeline progression: Commit -> Acceptance -> Capacity -> Production stages. For detailed stage definitions and quality gates, see cicd-and-deployment skill.

Site Reliability Engineering (Google -- Beyer et al.)

Key principles: SLOs over SLAs (internal targets stricter than external) | Error budgets (balance reliability and velocity) | Toil elimination (automate repetitive manual work) | Embrace risk (calculate risk, do not eliminate it).

Observability: Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) | SLI -> SLO -> Error Budget -> Alerting chain | Dashboards for investigation, not monitoring.

Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, Kim)

DORA Metrics

  • Deployment frequency: how often code deploys to production
  • Lead time for changes: time from commit to production
  • Change failure rate: % of deployments causing failure
  • Time to restore: time to recover from production failure

Performance Levels

Metric Elite High
Deployment frequency Multiple times/day Daily to weekly
Lead time < 1 hour 1 day to 1 week
Change failure rate 0-15% 16-30%
Time to restore < 1 hour < 1 day

Use DORA metrics as baselines when assessing current state and setting improvement targets.

Team Topologies (Skelton and Pais)

Team Types

  • Stream-aligned: delivers value to customer, owns full lifecycle
  • Platform: provides self-service capabilities, reduces cognitive load
  • Enabling: helps teams adopt new practices, temporary engagement
  • Complicated subsystem: owns complex technical domain

Platform Principles

Platform as a product (internal developer platform) | Self-service with guardrails | Reduce cognitive load on stream-aligned teams | Thinnest viable platform.

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 98 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 6fb02ea4c3f7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nw-platform-engineering-foundations is a skill published in the GitHub repository nWave-ai/nWave (605 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 912 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.