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

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