Guide

Infrastructure & CI/CD

When your deploy pipeline breaks at 2am, someone needs to understand it. We build infrastructure your team can own—not just operate.

The problem with pipelines today

Modern CI/CD tools are powerful, but power without structure creates problems. Teams inherit pipelines they don't understand, built by someone who left, documented nowhere.

The symptoms are familiar: deployments that "usually work," secrets scattered across env files and dashboards, staging environments that drift from production, and rollbacks that require calling the one person who knows how it all fits together.

With AI generating infrastructure code, the problem accelerates. You can scaffold a CI pipeline in minutes—but debugging it at 2am still takes hours.

Deployment pipeline

A deployment pipeline should be readable, debuggable, and owned by the team. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Build stage

• Reproducible builds — same commit produces identical artifacts, every time
• Explicit dependencies — everything declared, nothing implicit from the host
• Fast feedback — build failures visible within minutes, not after a 40-minute queue
• Artifact versioning — every build tagged with commit SHA and timestamp

Test stage

• Parallelized tests — test suites split to run concurrently where possible
• Clear failure messages — failing tests show what failed and why
• No flaky tests — tests that intermittently fail are fixed or quarantined
• Coverage thresholds — not for vanity metrics, but to catch regressions

Deploy stage

• Single command deploys — one command, one environment, no manual steps
• Health checks — deployment waits for application to be healthy before completing
• Deployment logs — every deployment logged with who, what, when, and outcome
• Notifications — team notified of deploy success or failure

Secrets management

Secrets are where infrastructure security lives or dies. We've seen production database passwords in Git history, API keys in Slack channels, and .env files committed "just for staging."

Principles

• Never in version control — secrets live in a secrets manager, not your repo
• Never in plain text — no .env files on servers, no secrets in CI logs
• Least privilege — each service gets only the secrets it needs
• Audited access — logs of who accessed what secret, when

Rotation

• Rotation support built in — applications handle secret rotation without restart
• Scheduled rotation — critical secrets rotated on a schedule, not "when we remember"
• Breach response — documented procedure to rotate all secrets quickly

Logging & observability

You can't debug what you can't see. Observability isn't about collecting more data—it's about collecting the right data and making it queryable.

Structured logging

• JSON format from day one — structured logs are parseable, grep-able, and aggregatable
• Consistent schema — every log includes timestamp, level, service, and message
• Correlation IDs — requests traced across services with a single ID
• No sensitive data — passwords, tokens, and PII never logged

Metrics

• RED metrics — Rate, Errors, Duration for every service
• Business metrics — the numbers that matter to your business, not just CPU
• Dashboards — key metrics visible at a glance, not buried in query results
• Alerts — actionable alerts with runbooks, not noise

Error tracking

• Errors grouped and deduplicated — same error doesn't create 1000 tickets
• Stack traces with context — user, request, and environment included
• Release correlation — errors mapped to the deploy that introduced them

Environment parity

The 12-Factor App calls this "Dev/prod parity." The goal: minimize the gap between development and production so bugs surface early, not in production.

What parity means

• Same backing services — if production uses Postgres, development uses Postgres (not SQLite)
• Same infrastructure — containers, networking, and configuration match
• Same dependencies — exact versions, not "latest"
• Clear indicators — every environment clearly labeled to prevent "deployed to prod by accident"

Infrastructure as code

• Version controlled — infrastructure changes go through pull requests
• Reproducible — environments can be recreated from code
• Self-documenting — the code is the documentation

Rollback procedures

Deploys will fail. The question is how fast you can recover. A good rollback takes seconds, not meetings.

Rollback capabilities

• One-command rollback — revert to previous version immediately
• Versioned artifacts — previous versions available, not overwritten
• Database compatibility — migrations designed to be backwards compatible
• Feature flags — disable features without deploying code

Incident response

• Runbooks — documented procedures for common failures
• On-call rotation — clear ownership of who responds
• Post-mortems — incidents analyzed to prevent recurrence

What you get

At the end of an infrastructure engagement, your team will have:

• Deployment pipeline with separate build, test, and deploy stages
• Secrets management with rotation support and audit logging
• Structured logging with correlation IDs and centralized aggregation
• Monitoring dashboards with RED metrics and actionable alerts
• Environment parity between development, staging, and production
• One-command rollback capability with documented procedures
• Infrastructure as code, version controlled and reproducible

You also get documentation: architecture decisions, runbooks for common issues, and a handover session so your team owns it from day one.

References: The Twelve-Factor App, Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, Google SRE Book, NIST National Vulnerability Database