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Assess the current state. Inventory existing infrastructure, deployment processes, and monitoring coverage. Identify manual steps, missing automation, single points of failure, and monitoring blind spots. Document the current deployment frequency and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
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Define the target state. Based on the team's requirements, define the desired deployment frequency, acceptable downtime, recovery targets (RTO/RPO), and scaling requirements. Align these targets with business criticality.
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Design the CI pipeline. Define the build stages: source checkout, dependency installation, linting, unit tests, integration tests, security scanning, artifact creation, and artifact storage. Each stage should have clear pass/fail criteria and produce actionable feedback on failure.
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Design the CD pipeline. Define the deployment stages: deploy to staging, run smoke tests, wait for manual approval (if required), deploy to production using the chosen strategy (blue-green, canary, rolling), run production smoke tests, monitor error rates, and auto-rollback if thresholds are exceeded.
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Implement infrastructure as code. Write the infrastructure definitions using the project's chosen IaC tool. Organize modules by concern (networking, compute, storage, monitoring). Use variables for environment-specific values. Implement state management with remote backends and state locking.
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Configure monitoring and alerting. Set up dashboards for the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Configure alerts with appropriate thresholds and notification channels. Implement runbook links in every alert so the on-call engineer knows what to do when paged.
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Implement secret management. Set up the secret store, define access policies, configure automatic rotation schedules, and integrate secret retrieval into the deployment pipeline. Verify that secrets are never logged or exposed in error messages.
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Test the disaster recovery plan. Simulate a failure scenario: database corruption, service outage, or region failover. Verify that the recovery procedure works within the defined RTO. Document the results and update runbooks based on findings.
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Document operational runbooks. Write step-by-step procedures for common operational tasks: scaling up, scaling down, rotating certificates, responding to common alerts, performing database backups and restores, and rolling back a deployment.
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Establish feedback loops. Set up deployment frequency tracking, MTTR measurement, change failure rate monitoring, and lead time metrics. Review these metrics weekly to identify bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline.
