DevOps & Deployment Skill

Comprehensive frameworks for CI/CD pipelines, containerization, deployment strategies, and infrastructure automation.

When to Use

• Setting up CI/CD pipelines
• Containerizing applications
• Deploying to Kubernetes or cloud platforms
• Implementing GitOps workflows
• Managing infrastructure as code
• Planning release strategies

Pipeline Architecture

┌─────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐
│    Code     │──▶│    Build    │──▶│    Test     │──▶│   Deploy    │
│   Commit    │   │   & Lint    │   │   & Scan    │   │  & Release  │
└─────────────┘   └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘
       │                 │                 │                 │
       ▼                 ▼                 ▼                 ▼
   Triggers         Artifacts          Reports          Monitoring

Key Concepts

CI/CD Pipeline Stages

1. Lint & Type Check - Code quality gates
2. Unit Tests - Test coverage with reporting
3. Security Scan - npm audit + Trivy vulnerability scanner
4. Build & Push - Docker image to container registry
5. Deploy Staging - Environment-gated deployment
6. Deploy Production - Manual approval or automated

See templates/github-actions-pipeline.yml for complete GitHub Actions workflow

Container Best Practices

Multi-stage builds minimize image size:

• Stage 1: Install production dependencies only
• Stage 2: Build application with dev dependencies
• Stage 3: Production runtime with minimal footprint

Security hardening:

• Non-root user (uid 1001)
• Read-only filesystem where possible
• Health checks for orchestrator integration

See templates/Dockerfile and templates/docker-compose.yml

Kubernetes Deployment

Essential manifests:

• Deployment with rolling update strategy
• Service for internal routing
• Ingress for external access with TLS
• HorizontalPodAutoscaler for scaling

Security context:

• runAsNonRoot: true
• allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
• readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
• Drop all capabilities

Resource management:

• Always set requests and limits
• Use requests for scheduling, limits for throttling

See templates/k8s-manifests.yaml and templates/helm-values.yaml

Deployment Strategies

Strategy	Use Case	Risk
Rolling	Default, gradual replacement	Low - automatic rollback
Blue-Green	Instant switch, easy rollback	Medium - double resources
Canary	Progressive traffic shift	Low - gradual exposure

Rolling Update (Kubernetes default):

strategy:
  type: RollingUpdate
  rollingUpdate:
    maxSurge: 25%
    maxUnavailable: 0  # Zero downtime

Blue-Green: Deploy to standby environment, switch service selector Canary: Use Istio VirtualService for traffic splitting (10% → 50% → 100%)

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform patterns:

• Remote state in S3 with DynamoDB locking
• Module-based architecture (VPC, EKS, RDS)
• Environment-specific tfvars files

See templates/terraform-aws.tf for AWS VPC + EKS + RDS example

GitOps with ArgoCD

ArgoCD watches Git repository and syncs cluster state:

• Automated sync with pruning
• Self-healing (drift detection)
• Retry policies for transient failures

See templates/argocd-application.yaml

Secrets Management

Use External Secrets Operator to sync from cloud providers:

• AWS Secrets Manager
• HashiCorp Vault
• Azure Key Vault
• GCP Secret Manager

See templates/external-secrets.yaml

Deployment Checklist

Pre-Deployment

• All tests passing in CI
• Security scans clean
• Database migrations ready
• Rollback plan documented

During Deployment

• Monitor deployment progress
• Watch error rates
• Verify health checks passing

Post-Deployment

• Verify metrics normal
• Check logs for errors
• Update status page

Helm Chart Structure

charts/app/
├── Chart.yaml
├── values.yaml
├── templates/
│   ├── deployment.yaml
│   ├── service.yaml
│   ├── ingress.yaml
│   ├── configmap.yaml
│   ├── secret.yaml
│   ├── hpa.yaml
│   └── _helpers.tpl
└── values/
    ├── staging.yaml
    └── production.yaml

Extended Thinking Triggers

Use Opus 4.5 extended thinking for:

• Architecture decisions - Kubernetes vs serverless, multi-region setup
• Migration planning - Moving between cloud providers
• Incident response - Complex deployment failures
• Security design - Zero-trust architecture

Templates Reference

Template	Purpose
github-actions-pipeline.yml	Full CI/CD workflow with 6 stages
Dockerfile	Multi-stage Node.js build
docker-compose.yml	Development environment
k8s-manifests.yaml	Deployment, Service, Ingress
helm-values.yaml	Helm chart values
terraform-aws.tf	VPC, EKS, RDS infrastructure
argocd-application.yaml	GitOps application
external-secrets.yaml	Secrets Manager integration