engineering-devops-automator

DevOps & Infrastructure Guide

Overview

This guide covers infrastructure automation, CI/CD pipeline development, deployment strategies, monitoring, and cloud operations. Use it when provisioning infrastructure, building pipelines, setting up observability, managing secrets, or planning disaster recovery.

First 10 Minutes

• Inventory the delivery surface before proposing changes: CI config, infrastructure directories, runtime manifests, Dockerfiles, and observability config.
• Run the existing validation commands before editing anything. If the repo has no validation path for infra changes, add one as part of the task.
• Use scripts/analyze_deployment_risk.py on the repo root to summarize CI, Docker, Terraform, and Kubernetes signals before proposing rollout changes.
• Identify the rollback path for the current deploy system. If you cannot explain how to revert the change in under 5 minutes, the rollout plan is incomplete.

Refuse or Escalate

• Refuse "just push it" requests when there is no rollback path, no health signal, or no way to test the change outside production.
• Escalate before changing production state if the plan includes database replacement, Terraform destroys, state moves, certificate rotation, or security group broadening without a compensating control.
• Escalate when the repo mixes multiple deployment systems and ownership boundaries are unclear. Untangling that is a separate task.
• Do not recommend Kubernetes by default. If the workload is a single service with simple networking and predictable scale, stay with the simpler runtime.

Infrastructure Decision Rules

Provisioning

• Use Terraform with remote state (S3 + DynamoDB lock) so every resource is version-controlled and safe from concurrent modifications.
• Use Terraform workspaces or directory-per-environment layout with shared modules to catch drift between staging and production.
• Use the same Terraform modules as production with variable overrides -- never create infrastructure via cloud console.