Hi I'm working on socializing the Platform Engineering concepts, but one thing that has come up lately is this older term, "service catalog" (I think this came out of the ITIL movement). These days, I see the term "Golden Paths" in most literature, but I've never seen anything that compares those two terms. Are they really just the same thing or are there differences / nuances between the two. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss this.

I would characterise them as largely similar, but with different focus. A service catalogue in my mind is about inventory / services - a way for engineers to get access to a new database (built with whatever business rules need to be followed) for their new service, for instance. A service catalogue is also the mechanism for storing the list of offerings and a way to search through them. Golden paths are similar in that they are codified, but in my mind they focus more on workflows - a predefined CI/CD template, for instance (built with whatever business rules need to be followed). Just my 2 cents 🙂