DevOps & Deployment Skill

Comprehensive frameworks for CI/CD pipelines, containerization, deployment strategies, and infrastructure automation.

Overview

• 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  │
└─────────────┘   └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘
       │                 │                 │                 │
       v                 v                 v                 v
   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

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

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

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

Secrets Management

Use External Secrets Operator to sync from cloud providers:

• AWS Secrets Manager
• HashiCorp Vault
• Azure Key Vault
• GCP Secret Manager

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References

Docker Patterns

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/docker-patterns.md")

Key topics covered:

• Multi-stage build examples with 78% size reduction
• Layer caching optimization
• Security hardening (non-root, health checks)
• Trivy vulnerability scanning
• Docker Compose development setup

CI/CD Pipelines

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/ci-cd-pipelines.md")

Key topics covered:

• Branch strategy (Git Flow)
• GitHub Actions caching (85% time savings)
• Artifact management
• Matrix testing
• Complete backend CI/CD example

Kubernetes Basics

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/kubernetes-basics.md")

Key topics covered:

• Health probes (startup, liveness, readiness)
• Security context configuration
• PodDisruptionBudget
• Resource quotas
• StatefulSets for databases
• Helm chart structure

Environment Management

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/environment-management.md")

Key topics covered:

• External Secrets Operator
• GitOps with ArgoCD
• Terraform patterns (remote state, modules)
• Zero-downtime database migrations
• Alembic migration workflow
• Rollback procedures

Observability

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/observability.md")

Key topics covered:

• Prometheus metrics exposition
• Grafana dashboard queries (PromQL)
• Alerting rules for SLOs
• Golden signals (SRE)
• Structured logging
• Distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry)

Railway Deployment

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/rules/railway-deployment.md")

Key topics covered:

• railway.json configuration, Nixpacks builds
• Environment variable management, database provisioning
• Multi-service setups, Railway CLI workflows
• References: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/railway-json-config.md, ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/nixpacks-customization.md, ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/multi-service-setup.md

Deployment Strategies

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/deployment-strategies.md")

Key topics covered:

• Rolling deployment
• Blue-green deployment
• Canary releases
• Traffic splitting with Istio

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Deployment Checklist & Templates

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/checklists-and-templates.md") for pre/during/post-deployment checklists, Helm chart structure, template reference table, and extended thinking triggers.

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Related Skills

• zero-downtime-migration - Database migration patterns for zero-downtime deployments
• security-scanning - Security scanning integration for CI/CD pipelines
• ork:monitoring-observability - Monitoring and alerting for deployed applications
• ork:database-patterns - Python/Alembic migration workflow for backend deployments
• portless (upstream) - Named .localhost URLs for multi-service local dev (portless alias api 8080)

Key Decisions

Decision	Choice	Rationale
Container user	Non-root (uid 1001)	Security best practice, required by many orchestrators
Deployment strategy	Rolling update (default)	Zero downtime, automatic rollback, resource efficient
Secrets management	External Secrets Operator	Syncs from cloud providers, GitOps compatible
Health checks	Separate startup/liveness/readiness	Prevents premature traffic, enables graceful shutdown

Capability Details

Load: Read("${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/capability-details.md") for full keyword index and problem-solution mapping across all 6 capabilities (ci-cd, docker, kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, deployment-strategies, observability).