Practice 06
DevOps & Platform Engineering
We build the platforms, pipelines, and practices that let engineering teams ship reliably and rapidly — CI/CD, GitOps, SRE, observability and AI-augmented pipeline tooling — from guarded workflow bots to infrastructure automation.
Follow the architecture
A release should carry its own evidence.
Explore the path from reviewed source to an observable service. Build once, promote the same artifact and separate deployment authority from untrusted code.
Source — Review the change
Keep intent, tests and ownership visible in version control. Protect release decisions with human review and appropriately scoped automation.
- Review code and configuration together
- Run targeted regression checks
- Keep secrets outside source control
Build — Create the artifact
Create a reproducible artifact in an isolated build context. Capture dependencies and provenance so the deployed result can be traced back to its source.
- Pin and review dependencies
- Scan artifacts and dependency risks
- Record checksums and provenance
Promote — Verify the boundary
Promote the tested artifact rather than rebuilding for each environment. Verify integrity and separate production permissions from build permissions.
- Verify artifact identity
- Scope environment credentials
- Require release approval
Runtime — Release safely
Choose deployment strategies that match the service risk. Health checks and rollback criteria should be defined before the rollout begins.
- Validate configuration and health
- Limit the initial blast radius
- Keep a rollback procedure ready
Observe — Operate the service
Use service-level objectives and actionable telemetry to detect customer impact. Every alert needs an owner and a useful response.
- Connect metrics, logs and traces
- Define error budgets and SLOs
- Review incidents without blame
Hover, focus or tap a flow node to reveal the decisions behind it.
Architecture, explored
Security is a system. Not a checkpoint.
Design questions to resolve
Start with a boundary. Build the bigger picture.
These are illustrative patterns, not a description of a deployed client system or a guarantee of compliance. The right architecture depends on your constraints, risks and operating model.
From concept to implementation
Technical scope & design decisions
Explore the questions, techniques and potential outputs that can shape an engagement. Final scope depends on the requirements and evidence available.
01CI/CD Pipeline Engineering
Enterprise continuous integration and delivery pipelines that enable teams to ship high-quality software with confidence — fast, secure, and repeatably to any environment.
Design & implementation focus
- CI/CD platform selection and migration from legacy tools
- GitHub Actions workflow design with reusable actions, job matrices and copilot-safe YAML guardrails
- GitLab CI pipeline design with multi-project pipelines and environments
- Pipeline security: SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning and secrets detection
- Deployment strategy implementation: blue-green, canary and feature flags
- Pipeline observability with build metrics, flakiness detection and optimisation
- Multi-environment promotion workflows with approval gates
- Compliance and audit trail for regulated software delivery (DORA metrics)
Potential engagement outputs
- Pipeline Architecture
- Workflow Templates
- Security Gates
- Deployment Strategies
- Observability Config
- DORA Dashboard
02Infrastructure as Code
Consistent, version-controlled infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, Bicep and CloudFormation — enabling repeatable, auditable, and policy-compliant cloud deployments at scale.
Design & implementation focus
- Terraform module library design for reusable, composable cloud infrastructure
- Terragrunt DRY configuration management across environments and accounts
- Azure Bicep module development for Azure-native IaC deployments
- AWS CDK application design with constructs, stacks and aspects
- Policy as Code: Checkov, Terraform Sentinel and OPA Rego rule libraries
- State management: S3/Azure Blob/GCS backends with locking and encryption
- Atlantis GitOps workflow for collaborative Terraform plan and apply
- IaC testing: Terratest, Kitchen-Terraform and Plan validation
Potential engagement outputs
- Module Library
- Environment Configs
- Policy Rules
- State Architecture
- GitOps Workflow
- Testing Framework
03Site Reliability Engineering
SRE practice implementation that transforms operations culture — establishing error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, automated remediation, and blameless post-mortem processes.
Design & implementation focus
- SRE operating model design and team onboarding programme
- SLI and SLO definition workshops aligned to user journeys and business objectives
- Error budget policy design and burn rate alerting implementation
- Toil identification, measurement and systematic elimination
- Chaos engineering with LitmusChaos and AWS Fault Injection Simulator
- Incident management: severity classification, escalation and war rooms
- Blameless post-mortem culture and process implementation
- Reliability scorecard and SRE maturity assessment framework
Potential engagement outputs
- SRE Operating Model
- SLI/SLO Catalogue
- Error Budget Policy
- Chaos Experiments
- Incident Playbooks
- Reliability Report
04Observability & Monitoring
Full-stack observability platforms that provide deep visibility into distributed systems — enabling rapid diagnosis, performance optimisation, and proactive reliability management.
Design & implementation focus
- OpenTelemetry instrumentation and collector pipeline design
- Prometheus and Thanos architecture for long-term metrics storage
- Grafana dashboard design with templating, alerting and on-call routing
- Distributed tracing with Jaeger, Tempo and Zipkin for root-cause diagnosis
- Log aggregation with Loki, Elastic or Splunk and structured logging standards
- Synthetic monitoring and uptime checks with Grafana Synthetic Monitoring
- Alerting strategy: signal-to-noise reduction, routing and escalation policies
- Business metric and SLO dashboards linking technical health to outcomes
Potential engagement outputs
- Observability Architecture
- Instrumentation Guide
- Dashboard Library
- Alerting Config
- Tracing Setup
- Runbooks
05GitOps & Release Automation
GitOps-driven deployment workflows that make every release safe, auditable, and reversible — using ArgoCD, Flux, and progressive delivery to manage complex multi-environment estates.
Design & implementation focus
- ArgoCD multi-cluster deployment with ApplicationSets and App of Apps
- Flux CD GitOps implementation with image update automation
- Helm release management with semantic versioning and release notes automation
- Progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts: canary, blue-green and A/B strategies
- Flagger automated canary analysis with Prometheus and custom metrics
- Feature flag integration with Unleash, LaunchDarkly and flagr
- Environment promotion workflows with automated drift detection
- Multi-tenancy: namespace isolation, RBAC and policy enforcement per team
Potential engagement outputs
- GitOps Architecture
- ArgoCD Configuration
- Helm Library
- Progressive Delivery
- Feature Flag Setup
- Promotion Workflow
06Platform Engineering & IDPs
Internal Developer Platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity, accelerate onboarding, and give engineering teams a golden path to production-ready services.
Design & implementation focus
- Internal Developer Portal design and implementation with Backstage
- Service catalogue with automated tech radar and dependency tracking
- Crossplane composition for self-service cloud infrastructure provisioning
- Golden path templates for language-specific, compliance-aware scaffolding
- Embedded IDE assistants and MCP-aware paved-road snippets aligned to platform APIs
- Developer experience assessment and friction point elimination
- Platform API design for self-service: environments, databases, secrets
- Onboarding automation: from PR merge to deployed service in under 15 minutes
- Platform adoption tracking and developer satisfaction measurement
Potential engagement outputs
- IDP Architecture
- Backstage Configuration
- Service Catalogue
- Golden Path Templates
- Crossplane Compositions
- DX Report
07Build & Test Automation
Enterprise build systems and test automation frameworks that maximise software quality, reduce feedback loops, and scale with large-scale monorepo and microservices estates.
Design & implementation focus
- Monorepo build tooling with Nx, Turborepo and Bazel for incremental builds
- Unit, integration and contract testing strategies with coverage enforcement
- End-to-end test automation with Playwright and Selenium for web applications
- API contract testing with Pact for consumer-driven contract validation
- Performance and load testing with k6, Gatling and JMeter
- Visual regression testing with Percy and Chromatic for frontend components
- Test data management and synthetic data generation for test environments
- Test environment provisioning with ephemeral namespaces and seed automation
Potential engagement outputs
- Build System
- Test Strategy
- Automation Framework
- Coverage Reports
- Load Test Results
- Test Data Platform
08FinOps & Cloud Operations
Operational frameworks and tooling that keep cloud environments healthy, cost-efficient, and aligned with business priorities through continuous governance and automation.
Design & implementation focus
- Cloud CMDB integration and automated asset discovery
- Patch management automation for cloud VMs, containers and managed services
- Change management tooling integrated with ServiceNow and Jira Service Management
- Runbook automation with Ansible, AWS Systems Manager and Azure Automation
- Cloud operations dashboard with health, cost and compliance KPIs
- Capacity planning and workload right-sizing automation
- Backup and disaster recovery testing automation and reporting
- Out-of-hours on-call rota design and escalation policy management
Potential engagement outputs
- Operations Playbook
- CMDB Design
- Patch Runbooks
- Change Workflow
- DR Test Reports
- Capacity Model