devops

name

devops

description

Guides DevOps—CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, release management, container delivery, observability, and SRE practices for build/deploy systems. Use when building or fixing pipelines, implementing GitOps, tuning alerts and SLOs, or managing on-call/incidents for delivery infrastructure—not for IDP/golden paths/developer portals (platform-engineer), raw VPC/IaC design (infrastructure-engineer), rollout cutover planning (deployment-strategist), security gates (devsecops), app features (senior-fullstack-developer), multi-team program coordination (technical-program-manager), or incident program design (severity, on-call, postmortems, paging integrations—incident-management-engineer). For Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, Helm releases, add-ons, and cluster-level debugging, use cluster-deployment-engineer. App latency profiling and load testing: performance-engineer. ML safeguard serving: ml-infrastructure-engineer-safeguards. RL training platform jobs: ml-systems-engineer-rl-engineering.

DevOps

When to Use

• Build, fix, or optimize CI/CD pipelines and release automation
• Implement GitOps, artifact promotion, container delivery, or environment automation
• Set up service observability, SLOs, alerting, and runbooks for delivery infrastructure
• Operate on-call workflows for build, deploy, and runtime reliability issues
• Standardize deployment mechanics for application teams

When NOT to Use

• Design rollout strategy, cutover, rollback triggers, or release risk tiers → deployment-strategist
• Build internal developer portals, golden paths, or platform-as-product roadmaps → platform-engineer
• Provision core cloud networks, IAM, or Terraform modules as the main task → infrastructure-engineer
• Add security gates, SBOMs, artifact signing, or CI threat modeling → devsecops
• Design SEV programs, paging policy, or postmortem process → incident-management-engineer
• Deep SLO/error-budget program, PRR, reliability engineering per service → site-reliability-engineer

Related skills

Need	Skill
SLOs, error budgets, PRR, reliability ownership	site-reliability-engineer
Cloud VPC, IAM, Terraform modules	infrastructure-engineer
Managed cloud services and networking	cloud-engineer
SAST, SBOM, OIDC hardening, pipeline security	devsecops
Data pipeline SLAs and warehouse ops	data-system-ops-lead
App code, APIs, UI	senior-fullstack-developer
Rollout strategy, cutover plans, change tiers	deployment-strategist
IDP, golden paths, developer portal, platform APIs	platform-engineer
Cross-team milestones, RAID, launch council	technical-program-manager
SEV model, on-call program, postmortem process	incident-management-engineer
K8s cluster deploy and operations	cluster-deployment-engineer
App profiling, load tests, perf regression	performance-engineer

Core Workflows

1. CI/CD pipeline design

Standard stage order:

checkout → lint/test → build → publish artifact → deploy non-prod → integration/e2e → promote prod

Checklist:

• Pipeline as code in repo; versioned with application
• Reproducible builds (locked deps, pinned base images)
• Parallelize independent jobs; cache dependencies
• Artifact immutability (digest, not floating tag)
• Manual or policy gate before production
• Rollback path documented and tested quarterly

See references/cicd_releases.md for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and deployment patterns.

2. GitOps and environments

1. Declare desired state in git (Helm, Kustomize, Terraform for apps)
2. Sync via Argo CD or Flux; drift detection enabled
3. One branch or path per environment; promotion via PR
4. Secrets never in git—use External Secrets / sealed secrets
5. Audit sync events and failed reconciliations

See references/gitops_environments.md for promotion flows and config layering.

3. Observability and SRE

Minimum observability per service:

Signal	What to capture
Metrics	RED/USE: rate, errors, duration, saturation
Logs	Structured JSON, correlation ID, no secrets
Traces	Critical paths and cross-service calls

SLO workflow: pick SLI → set target and error budget → alert on burn rate → review in weekly ops.

See references/observability_sre.md for SLI examples, alert hygiene, and runbook links.

4. Incident and on-call

1. Triage severity (customer impact, data risk)
2. Mitigate (rollback, scale, feature flag)
3. Communicate status on cadence
4. Post-incident review within 48h for SEV1–2
5. Track action items to closure

See references/incident_oncall.md for severity matrix and handoff template.

5. Developer platform (optional)

• Golden paths: template repos, standard pipelines, local dev parity
• Self-service environments with guardrails
• Cost and quota visibility per team

See references/platform_engineering.md for IDP scope and build-vs-buy.

When to load references

• Pipelines and releases → references/cicd_releases.md
• GitOps and env promotion → references/gitops_environments.md
• Metrics, SLOs, alerts → references/observability_sre.md
• Incidents and on-call → references/incident_oncall.md
• Internal developer platform → references/platform_engineering.md