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.