Agent Skills: DevOps & Deployment Skill

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 |