Description

This curriculum spans the design and governance of CI/CD systems, infrastructure automation, and cross-team coordination at the scale of multi-team platform engineering programs within regulated enterprise environments.

Module 1: Integrating Development and Operations Cultures

Establish shared on-call rotations between developers and operations to align incentives and reduce blame-driven incident responses.
Define and document team-level service ownership, including escalation paths, runbooks, and support expectations for production systems.
Implement blameless postmortems with required participation from both development and operations stakeholders to drive systemic improvements.
Negotiate SLIs and SLOs for critical services with product and operations teams to set measurable reliability targets.
Standardize communication channels (e.g., incident bridges, status dashboards) to ensure real-time alignment during outages.
Adopt cross-functional feature triads (dev, ops, product) during planning to surface operational risks early in the development lifecycle.

Module 2: Designing CI/CD Pipelines for Scale and Safety

Enforce pipeline-as-code using version-controlled YAML or HCL to enable peer review and auditability of build and deployment logic.
Implement parallel test stages with environment isolation to reduce feedback cycle times without sacrificing test integrity.
Introduce canary analysis gates using metrics from monitoring systems (e.g., error rates, latency) before promoting releases.
Configure artifact immutability and cryptographic signing to prevent tampering and ensure deployment consistency across environments.
Design rollback mechanisms with automated configuration rollback and data migration compensation where applicable.
Limit pipeline concurrency and resource allocation to prevent resource exhaustion during high-frequency deployments.

Module 3: Infrastructure as Code and Environment Management

Structure Terraform or Pulumi configurations using reusable modules with version pinning to ensure reproducible environments.
Implement environment promotion workflows using tagged artifacts rather than rebuilding from source at each stage.
Enforce policy-as-code using tools like Open Policy Agent or HashiCorp Sentinel to block non-compliant infrastructure changes.
Separate state management per environment (e.g., dev, staging, prod) with restricted access controls and audit logging.
Automate drift detection and remediation for production environments to maintain configuration integrity.
Define environment lifecycle policies, including automated teardown of ephemeral environments after merge or timeout.

Module 4: Secure Software Supply Chain Practices

Integrate software bill of materials (SBOM) generation into the build pipeline for every artifact using tools like Syft or CycloneDX.
Enforce vulnerability scanning of dependencies and container images with policy-based failure thresholds in CI.
Implement signed commits and artifact provenance using Sigstore or similar to authenticate developer identity and build origin.
Restrict base image sources to approved internal registries with regular patching schedules and CVE monitoring.
Apply least-privilege principles to CI runners by segmenting jobs and minimizing access to production secrets.
Conduct regular access reviews for pipeline service accounts and rotate credentials using automated secret management.

Module 5: Observability-Driven Development

Require structured logging with consistent schema and correlation IDs across services to enable cross-service tracing.
Instrument service code with custom metrics for business-critical workflows (e.g., checkout success rate, API latency percentiles).
Define and deploy synthetic transactions to monitor end-to-end user journeys in staging and production.
Integrate observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) into local development environments for early debugging.
Enforce log retention and sampling policies based on data sensitivity and cost constraints.
Configure alerting rules with clear runbook references and avoid alert fatigue through signal-to-noise optimization.

Module 6: Managing Technical Debt in Agile DevOps Teams

Allocate sprint capacity (e.g., 20%) explicitly for infrastructure and reliability improvements using a technical backlog.
Track technical debt items in the same issue tracker as feature work with defined owners and resolution criteria.
Implement automated code quality gates (e.g., SonarQube) with baseline thresholds to prevent degradation.
Conduct architecture decision record (ADR) reviews for major changes to ensure traceability and alignment.
Measure and report on lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR to prioritize investments in process improvement.
Rotate developers through operational tasks (e.g., incident response, monitoring tuning) to maintain awareness of system health.

Module 7: Scaling DevOps Across Multiple Teams

Establish a platform engineering team to provide self-service tooling and standardized templates for onboarding.
Define API contracts and versioning policies for inter-team service dependencies to reduce integration risk.
Implement centralized observability and audit logging with team-level access controls for compliance and troubleshooting.
Coordinate deployment freeze windows during critical business periods with cross-team sign-off and rollback readiness checks.
Standardize CI/CD interfaces (e.g., CLI, API) to reduce cognitive load when teams manage multiple services.
Run quarterly cross-team DevOps maturity assessments to identify bottlenecks and share improvements.

Module 8: Compliance and Audit Readiness in Continuous Delivery

Embed compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GDPR data handling, PCI controls) with automated evidence collection.
Maintain immutable audit trails of all deployment events, including who deployed, what changed, and when.
Segregate duties in pipeline approvals by requiring peer review and operations sign-off for production promotions.
Generate compliance reports from pipeline and infrastructure logs using automated aggregation tools.
Conduct regular dry runs of audit responses using historical deployment data to validate evidence availability.
Design data retention policies for logs and artifacts to meet regulatory requirements without incurring unnecessary storage costs.