devops-excellence

DevOps Excellence

Core Principles

• Shift Left — Address security and quality early in SDLC
• GitOps — Git as single source of truth for infrastructure and deployments
• Infrastructure as Code — All infrastructure versioned and reproducible
• Progressive Delivery — Gradual rollouts with feature flags and canary releases
• Immutable Infrastructure — Replace, don't modify running systems
• Observability-First — Monitor metrics tied to deployments and features
• Policy as Code — Enforce compliance and security automatically
• Platform Engineering — Build golden paths and self-service portals

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Hard Rules (Must Follow)

These rules are mandatory. Violating them means the skill is not working correctly.

No Static Credentials

Never use long-lived static credentials. Always use OIDC or short-lived tokens.

# ❌ FORBIDDEN: Static AWS credentials
env:
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

# ✅ REQUIRED: OIDC-based authentication
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
  uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
  with:
    role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/GitHubActions
    aws-region: us-east-1
    # No long-lived secrets - uses GitHub OIDC provider

No Root Containers

Containers must NEVER run as root. Always specify a non-root user.

# ❌ FORBIDDEN: Running as root (default)
FROM node:20
WORKDIR /app
CMD ["node", "server.js"]

# ❌ FORBIDDEN: Explicit root user
USER root

# ✅ REQUIRED: Non-root user with UID > 1000
FROM node:20-alpine
RUN addgroup -g 1001 -S nodejs && \
    adduser -S nodejs -u 1001
USER nodejs
WORKDIR /app
CMD ["node", "server.js"]

No Secrets in Images

Never bake secrets into Docker images. Use runtime injection or secrets managers.

# ❌ FORBIDDEN: Secrets in build args or ENV
ARG DATABASE_PASSWORD
ENV API_KEY=sk-xxx

# ❌ FORBIDDEN: Copying secret files
COPY .env /app/.env
COPY credentials.json /app/

# ✅ REQUIRED: Mount secrets at runtime
# docker run -v /secrets:/app/secrets:ro myapp
# Or use Kubernetes secrets/configmaps