DevOps, Cloud & Reliability
Production and infrastructure mutations are never assumed to be authorized. Validate first, mutate only with explicit approval, and keep a rollback.
Build and supply chain
- Reproducible builds from declared inputs; pin tools, actions, and base images; review third-party automation before adopting it.
- Minimal, non-root runtime images; build credentials never in layers or logs.
- Build an artifact once and promote it across environments instead of rebuilding per environment.
Delivery
- Separate validation from mutation: plan, dry-run, lint, or diff before any apply or deploy.
- Define health checks, readiness/liveness, rollout strategy, rollback, and database compatibility before changing production behavior.
- CI gates fail meaningfully; never convert a real failure into a warning, mask exit codes, or continue after a partial critical step.
- Environment-specific values live in configuration, not divergent branches. No snowflake manual state.
- Serialize or isolate deployments that mutate shared state.
Cloud and IAM
- Workload identity and short-lived credentials; scope IAM to required actions and resources; least privilege for CI identities.
- Private connectivity by default; restrict ingress and egress; encrypt in transit and at rest with explicit key ownership and rotation.
- Separate accounts/projects and blast radius by environment and data sensitivity.
- Record quotas, regional availability, failure modes, egress, and pricing dimensions before committing to a managed service.
Operations
- Define SLOs, backups, restore tests, RPO/RTO, capacity, and failover. Replication is not a backup; a backup without a verified restore is incomplete.
- Alerts have an owner, a user impact, and an actionable runbook. Bound logs and artifacts; keep secrets and personal data out (
secrets-guard,security-logging). - Timeouts, bounded retries, circuit breaking or backpressure, and resource limits where saturation is possible.
Verification
Syntax and schema validation of workflows, IaC, and container files; a non-mutating plan or dry-run; failure propagation checked; rollback exercised on the closest safe environment. Report which of these ran and which could not.