Core Practices & Principles These practices operationalize DevOps values and create sustainable delivery performance.
Foundational Principles Principle Summary Example Shift Left Surface issues earlier Security scanning on PR Automate Everything Repetitive Reduce toil / error Infra pipelines Build Quality In Continuous verification Test pyramid + contracts Small Batch Size Faster feedback & rollback Feature flags Trunk-Based Flow Avoid long-lived divergence Daily main merges Observability First Know what's happening internally Structured logs + traces Everything as Code Declarative, versioned state Git-managed infra, policies
Technical Practices Version control everything (infra, schemas, policies) Continuous Integration (frequent mainline integration, fast tests) Continuous Delivery (automated promotion, environment parity) Infrastructure as Code & Immutable artifacts Configuration Management + Secret Management hygiene GitOps for reconciliation (future advanced topic placeholder): This will include practices like declarative configurations, reconciliation loops, and tools such as Argo CD. Policy as Code for compliance (placeholder): This will cover automated policy enforcement using tools like OPA and Conftest, with examples for CI/CD pipelines. Reliability & Resilience Aspect Practice Reliability SLOs + Error Budgets Resilience Chaos experiments, graceful degradation Capacity Autoscaling policies, load shedding Disaster Recovery Run failover game days
Security & Governance (DevSecOps Lens) Threat modeling early in design Dependency scanning & SBOM generation Least privilege & Just-in-time access Runtime security (container & cluster hardening) Policy gates in pipelines (OPA / Conftest) Continuous Improvement Mechanisms Mechanism Purpose Blameless Postmortems Process + systemic learning Value Stream Mapping Flow optimization Engineering Health Metrics Detect burnout/toil Technical Debt Register Prioritize remediation
When to Introduce Each Stage Focus Just Starting CI + version control + small deploys Scaling Teams IaC, observability, CD, SLOs Growing Surface Area Platform patterns, policy as code Operating at Scale Error budgets, chaos, governance automation
Next: Culture & Collaboration