azure-validate

Azure Validate

Systematically validate deployments against infrastructure, security, performance, and operational readiness criteria. Provide go/no-go decision for production release.

Use This Skill When

• The user has deployed to staging and needs production readiness verification
• The user asks for preflight checks, health verification, or sign-off gates
• Deployment is ready but needs validation against SLA and compliance requirements
• There's a need to verify monitoring, alerting, and incident response readiness

Context: Validation Maturity

Immature: Manual spot checks, no automation, inconsistent criteria
Developing: Some automated tests, partial validation, manual sign-off
Managed: Automated checks, clear pass/fail criteria, documented gates → Target
Optimized: Full CI/CD integration, policy-as-code, real-time compliance dashboards

Required Inputs

• Deployment scope: All resources, environment, regions
• SLA targets: Availability (%), latency (ms, p99), throughput (req/sec)
• Traffic model: Expected load profile and peak burst
• Security & compliance: HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC2, audit requirements?
• User journeys: Critical paths to test (e.g., user signup → purchase → confirmation)
• Acceptance criteria: Performance baseline, error rate threshold
• Rollback plan: How to revert if validation fails?

Decision Tree

Have all infrastructure resources been provisioned?
├─ No → BLOCK: Complete infrastructure deployment first
└─ Yes → Continue

Are all required monitoring and alerting configured?
├─ No → WARNING: Cannot track production health; recommend staging validation only
└─ Yes → Continue

Has security baseline been applied (NSGs, RBAC, encryption)?
├─ No → BLOCK: Security validation must pass before production
└─ Yes → Continue

Do all smoke tests and end-to-end flows pass?
├─ No → BLOCK: Application logic failures prevent release
└─ Yes → Continue

Does load testing meet SLA targets?
├─ No → WARNING: May fail under expected load; consider remediation
└─ Yes → READY FOR PRODUCTION