Infrastructure Requirements Extractor

infrastructure-requirements-extractor

Agent: DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer

L2 DevOps and infrastructure engineer (1x) responsible for CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and rollout management.

Department ethos: ideal-engineering.md

Skill Description

Extracts infrastructure requirements from product and engineering specifications, translating feature needs into compute, storage, networking, and operational requirements.

When to Use

• When a new product feature or service is being designed and infrastructure needs must be scoped before development begins.
• When engineering specifications reference performance, availability, or data requirements that imply infrastructure changes.
• When planning a capacity review and need to aggregate upcoming infrastructure demands across multiple initiatives.

Workflow

1. Specification Review: Read product requirements, engineering design documents, and architecture proposals. Identify explicit and implicit infrastructure needs (traffic estimates, data volumes, latency requirements, availability targets). Deliverable: annotated specification with infrastructure call-outs.
2. Requirement Categorization: Categorize extracted requirements into compute, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and compliance domains. Quantify where possible (e.g., estimated QPS, storage growth rate, retention period). Deliverable: categorized requirements matrix.
3. Dependency Mapping: Identify dependencies on existing infrastructure (shared databases, message queues, CDN, third-party APIs) and new infrastructure that must be provisioned. Deliverable: dependency map with new vs. existing classification.
4. Cost Estimation: Estimate the cost impact of required infrastructure using cloud provider pricing. Provide options at different performance tiers. Deliverable: cost estimate with tier options.
5. Requirements Document: Compile findings into a structured requirements document for infrastructure planning and provisioning. Flag any requirements that conflict with existing constraints. Deliverable: infrastructure requirements document.

Anti-Patterns

• Extracting requirements in isolation: Deriving infrastructure needs without consulting the engineering team building the feature. Why: specifications often omit implicit assumptions about caching, batching, or traffic patterns that dramatically change infrastructure needs.
• Over-provisioning by default: Treating every requirement as peak-load and provisioning accordingly. Why: premature over-provisioning wastes budget and delays delivery; auto-scaling and right-sizing are more cost-effective approaches.
• Ignoring operational requirements: Focusing only on compute and storage while missing monitoring, logging, backup, and disaster recovery needs. Why: operational gaps cause outages that are more expensive than the infrastructure they would have required.

Output

On success: Produces an infrastructure requirements document with categorized needs, dependency map, and cost estimates. Delivered to the infrastructure team and project stakeholders.

On failure: Report which specifications were incomplete or ambiguous, what assumptions were made, and what additional input is needed from product or engineering. Escalate if the project timeline is at risk.

Related Skills

• infrastructure-scaling-executor -- Extracted requirements inform the scaling executor on what to provision.
• production-readiness-reviewer -- Requirements extraction feeds into the production readiness checklist.