DevOps Engineering — Quick Reference

This skill equips teams with actionable templates, checklists, and patterns for building self-service platforms, automating infrastructure with GitOps, deploying securely with DevSecOps, scaling with Kubernetes, ensuring reliability through SRE practices, and operating production systems with strong observability.

Modern Best Practices (Jan 2026): Kubernetes 1.33+ (supported releases + version skew policy), Docker Engine v27, Terraform 1.x (current stable in 1.14.x), GitOps with Argo CD v3 and Flux v2, OpenTelemetry for traces/metrics/logs, and eBPF-based observability where it meaningfully reduces operational overhead.

Quick Reference

Decision Tree: Choosing DevOps Approach

What do you need to accomplish?
    ├─ Infrastructure provisioning?
    │   ├─ Cloud-agnostic → Terraform (multi-cloud support)
    │   ├─ AWS-specific → CloudFormation or Terraform
    │   ├─ GCP-specific → Deployment Manager or Terraform
    │   └─ Azure-specific → ARM templates or Terraform
    │
    ├─ Application deployment?
    │   ├─ Kubernetes cluster?
    │   │   ├─ Simple deploy → kubectl apply -f manifests/
    │   │   ├─ Complex app → Helm charts
    │   │   └─ GitOps workflow → ArgoCD or FluxCD
    │   └─ Serverless?
    │       ├─ AWS → Lambda + SAM/Serverless Framework
    │       ├─ GCP → Cloud Functions
    │       └─ Azure → Azure Functions
    │
    ├─ CI/CD pipeline setup?
    │   ├─ GitHub-based → GitHub Actions (template-github-actions.md)
    │   ├─ GitLab-based → GitLab CI
    │   ├─ Enterprise → Jenkins or Tekton
    │   └─ Security-first → Add SAST/DAST/SCA scans (template-ci-cd.md)
    │
    ├─ Observability & monitoring?
    │   ├─ Metrics → Prometheus + Grafana
    │   ├─ Distributed tracing → Jaeger or OpenTelemetry
    │   ├─ Logs → Loki or ELK stack
    │   ├─ eBPF-based → Cilium + Hubble (sidecarless)
    │   └─ Unified platform → Datadog or New Relic
    │
    ├─ Incident management?
    │   ├─ On-call rotation → PagerDuty or Opsgenie
    │   ├─ Postmortem → template-postmortem.md
    │   └─ Communication → template-incident-comm.md
    │
    ├─ Platform engineering?
    │   ├─ Self-service → Backstage or Port (internal developer portal)
    │   ├─ Policy enforcement → OPA/Gatekeeper
    │   └─ Golden paths → Template repositories + automation
    │
    └─ Security hardening?
        ├─ Container scanning → Trivy or Grype
        ├─ Runtime security → Falco or Sysdig
        ├─ Secrets management → HashiCorp Vault or cloud-native KMS
        └─ Compliance → CIS Benchmarks, template-security-hardening.md

When to Use This Skill

Claude should invoke this skill when users request:

• Platform engineering patterns (self-service developer platforms, internal tools)
• GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, FluxCD, declarative infrastructure management)
• Infrastructure as Code patterns (Terraform, K8s manifests, policy as code)
• CI/CD pipelines with DevSecOps (GitHub Actions, security scanning, SAST/DAST/SCA)
• SRE incident management, escalation, and postmortem templates
• eBPF-based observability (Cilium, Hubble, kernel-level insights, OpenTelemetry)
• Kubernetes operational patterns (day-2 operations, resource management, workload placement)
• Cloud-native monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, unified observability platforms)
• Team workflow, communication, handover guides, and runbooks

Resources (Best Practices Guides)

Operational best practices by domain:

• DevOps/SRE Operations: resources/devops-best-practices.md - Core patterns for safe infrastructure changes, deployments, and incident response
• Platform Engineering: resources/platform-engineering-patterns.md - Self-service platforms, golden paths, internal developer portals, policy as code
• GitOps Workflows: resources/gitops-workflows.md - Continuous reconciliation, multi-environment promotion, ArgoCD/FluxCD patterns, progressive delivery
• SRE Incident Management: resources/sre-incident-management.md - Severity classification, escalation procedures, blameless postmortems, alert correlation, and runbooks
• Operational Standards: resources/operational-patterns.md - Platform engineering blueprints, CI/CD safety, SLOs, and reliability drills

Each guide includes:

• Checklists for completeness and safety
• Common anti-patterns and remediations
• Step-by-step patterns for safe rollout, rollback, and verification
• Decision matrices (e.g., deployment, escalation, monitoring strategy)
• Real-world examples and edge case handling

Templates (Copy-Paste Ready)

Production templates organized by tech stack (27 templates total):

AWS Cloud

• templates/aws/template-aws-ops.md - AWS service operations and best practices
• templates/aws/template-aws-terraform.md - Terraform modules for AWS infrastructure
• templates/aws/template-cost-optimization.md - AWS cost optimization strategies

GCP Cloud

• templates/gcp/template-gcp-ops.md - GCP service operations
• templates/gcp/template-gcp-terraform.md - Terraform modules for GCP

Azure Cloud

• templates/azure/template-azure-ops.md - Azure service operations

Kubernetes

• templates/kubernetes/template-kubernetes-ops.md - Day-to-day K8s operations
• templates/kubernetes/template-ha-dr.md - High availability and disaster recovery
• templates/kubernetes/template-platform-api.md - Platform API patterns
• templates/kubernetes/template-k8s-deploy.yaml - Deployment manifests

Docker

• templates/docker/template-docker-ops.md - Container build, security, and operations

Kafka

• templates/kafka/template-kafka-ops.md - Kafka cluster operations and streaming

Terraform & IaC

• templates/terraform-iac/template-iac-terraform.md - Infrastructure as Code patterns
• templates/terraform-iac/template-module.md - Reusable Terraform modules
• templates/terraform-iac/template-env-promotion.md - Environment promotion strategies

CI/CD Pipelines

• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-ci-cd.md - General CI/CD patterns
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-github-actions.md - GitHub Actions workflows
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-gitops.md - GitOps deployment patterns
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-release-safety.md - Safe release practices

Monitoring & Observability

• templates/monitoring-observability/template-slo.md - Service level objectives
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-alert-rules.md - Alert configuration
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-observability-slo.md - Observability patterns
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-loadtest-perf.md - Load testing and performance

Incident Response

• templates/incident-response/template-postmortem.md - Incident postmortems
• templates/incident-response/template-runbook-starter.md - Runbook starter template
• templates/incident-response/template-incident-comm.md - Incident communication
• templates/incident-response/template-incident-response.md - Incident response procedures

Security

• templates/security/template-security-hardening.md - Security hardening checklists

Navigation

Resources

• resources/operational-patterns.md
• resources/sre-incident-management.md
• resources/devops-best-practices.md
• resources/platform-engineering-patterns.md
• resources/gitops-workflows.md

Shared Utilities (Centralized patterns — extract, don't duplicate)

• ../software-clean-code-standard/utilities/config-validation.md — Zod 3.24+, secrets management (Vault, 1Password, Doppler)
• ../software-clean-code-standard/utilities/resilience-utilities.md — p-retry v6, circuit breaker, OTel spans
• ../software-clean-code-standard/utilities/logging-utilities.md — pino v9 + OpenTelemetry integration
• ../software-clean-code-standard/utilities/observability-utilities.md — OpenTelemetry SDK, tracing, metrics
• ../software-clean-code-standard/utilities/testing-utilities.md — Test factories, fixtures, mocks
• ../software-clean-code-standard/resources/clean-code-standard.md — Canonical clean code rules (CC-*) for citation

Templates

• templates/incident-response/template-postmortem.md
• templates/incident-response/template-runbook-starter.md
• templates/incident-response/template-incident-comm.md
• templates/incident-response/template-incident-response.md
• templates/docker/template-docker-ops.md
• templates/security/template-security-hardening.md
• templates/azure/template-azure-ops.md
• templates/gcp/template-gcp-terraform.md
• templates/gcp/template-gcp-ops.md
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-release-safety.md
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-gitops.md
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-ci-cd.md
• templates/cicd-pipelines/template-github-actions.md
• templates/kafka/template-kafka-ops.md
• templates/aws/template-aws-terraform.md
• templates/aws/template-aws-ops.md
• templates/aws/template-cost-optimization.md
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-slo.md
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-loadtest-perf.md
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-alert-rules.md
• templates/monitoring-observability/template-observability-slo.md
• templates/kubernetes/template-k8s-deploy.yaml
• templates/kubernetes/template-platform-api.md
• templates/kubernetes/template-kubernetes-ops.md
• templates/kubernetes/template-ha-dr.md
• templates/terraform-iac/template-env-promotion.md
• templates/terraform-iac/template-iac-terraform.md
• templates/terraform-iac/template-module.md

Data

• data/sources.json — Curated external references

Related Skills

Operations & Infrastructure:

• ../qa-resilience/SKILL.md — Resilience, chaos engineering, and failure handling patterns
• ../data-sql-optimization/SKILL.md — Database tuning, high availability, and migrations
• ../qa-observability/SKILL.md — Monitoring, tracing, profiling, and performance optimization
• ../qa-debugging/SKILL.md — Production debugging, log analysis, and root cause investigation

Security & Compliance:

• ../software-security-appsec/SKILL.md — Application-layer security patterns and OWASP best practices

Software Development:

• ../software-backend/SKILL.md — Service-level design and integration patterns
• ../software-architecture-design/SKILL.md — System design, scalability, and architectural patterns
• ../dev-api-design/SKILL.md — RESTful API design and versioning
• ../git-workflow/SKILL.md — Git branching strategies and CI/CD integration

Optional: AI/Automation (Related Skills):

• ../ai-mlops/SKILL.md — ML model deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management

Cost Governance & Capacity Planning

templates/cost-governance/template-cost-governance.md — Production cost control for cloud infrastructure.

Key Sections

• Cost Governance Framework — Tagging strategy, budget alerts, anomaly detection
• Cloud Cost Optimization — Right-sizing, reserved capacity, storage tiering
• Kubernetes Cost Control — Resource requests/limits, quotas, autoscaler config
• Capacity Planning — Utilization baseline, growth projections, scaling triggers
• FinOps Practices — Monthly review agenda, optimization workflow

Do / Avoid

GOOD: Do

• Tag all resources at creation time
• Set budget alerts before hitting limits
• Review right-sizing recommendations monthly
• Use spot/preemptible for fault-tolerant workloads
• Set Kubernetes resource requests on all pods
• Enable cluster autoscaler with scale-down
• Document capacity planning assumptions
• Run postmortems after every incident

BAD: Avoid

• Deploying without cost tags
• Running dev resources 24/7
• Over-provisioning "just in case"
• Ignoring reserved capacity opportunities
• Disabling scale-down to "avoid disruption"
• Alert fatigue (too many low-priority alerts)
• Snowflake infrastructure (manual, undocumented)
• "Clickops" drift (changes outside IaC)

Anti-Patterns

Optional: AI/Automation

Note: AI assists with analysis but cost/incident decisions need human approval.

Automated Operations

• Unused resource detection and notification
• Right-sizing recommendation generation
• Alert summarization and correlation
• Runbook step suggestions

AI-Assisted Analysis

• Cost trend prediction
• Incident pattern identification
• Post-mortem theme extraction

Bounded Claims

• AI recommendations need validation before action
• Automated deletions require approval workflow
• Cost predictions are estimates, not guarantees
• Runbook suggestions need SRE verification

Operational Deep Dives

See resources/operational-patterns.md for:

• Platform engineering blueprints and GitOps reconciliation checklists
• DevSecOps CI/CD gates, SLO/SLI playbooks, and rollout verification steps
• Observability patterns (eBPF), incident noise reduction, and reliability drills

External Resources

See data/sources.json for 45+ curated sources organized by tech stack:

• Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure documentation and best practices
• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, Docker
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates
• CI/CD & GitOps: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, ArgoCD, FluxCD
• Streaming: Apache Kafka, Confluent, Strimzi
• Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger
• SRE: Google SRE books, incident response patterns
• Security: OWASP DevSecOps, CIS Benchmarks, Trivy, Falco
• Tools: kubectl, k9s, stern, Cosign, Syft, Terragrunt

Use this skill as a hub for safe, modern, and production-grade DevOps patterns. All templates and patterns are operational—no theory or book summaries.