DevOps — Infrastructure & Deployment
Ship reliably. Monitor everything. Fix fast.
Deployment Checklist
Before any deploy:
- All tests pass in CI (not just locally)
- Environment variables set in target environment
- Database migrations tested against production-like data
- Rollback plan documented (even if it's "revert this commit")
- Health check endpoint exists and returns 200
CI/CD Pipeline
push → lint → typecheck → test → build → deploy staging → smoke test → deploy prod| Stage | Fails? | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Lint/Types | Block merge | Fix locally |
| Tests | Block merge | Fix or update tests |
| Build | Block merge | Fix build errors |
| Staging deploy | Block prod | Debug in staging |
| Smoke test | Block prod | Rollback staging, investigate |
| Prod deploy | Alert on-call | Rollback immediately |
Docker
# Multi-stage build — keep images small
FROM node:22-alpine AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --production=false
COPY . .
RUN npm run build
FROM node:22-alpine
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/dist ./dist
COPY --from=builder /app/node_modules ./node_modules
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "dist/server.js"]Rules:
- Always pin base image versions (not
latest) - Use
.dockerignore— never shipnode_modules,.git,.env - One process per container
- Health check in Dockerfile:
HEALTHCHECK CMD curl -f http://localhost:3000/health
Monitoring
| What | Tool Options | Alert When |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime | UptimeRobot, Checkly | Down > 30 seconds |
| Errors | Sentry, Datadog | Error rate > 1% |
| Latency | Grafana, Datadog | p95 > 2 seconds |
| Resources | Cloud provider metrics | CPU > 80%, memory > 85% |
| Logs | Datadog, Axiom, CloudWatch | Error patterns, keywords |
Rules:
- Every alert must have a runbook (even a one-liner)
- If an alert fires and needs no action, delete it — alert fatigue kills
- Log structured JSON, not printf strings
- Include request ID in every log line for tracing
Infrastructure Defaults
| Decision | Default | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Vercel / Railway / Fly.io | Zero-config, scales |
| Database | Managed Postgres (Supabase, Neon, RDS) | Don't manage your own DB |
| Cache | Upstash Redis | Serverless, no ops |
| Queue | Inngest, Trigger.dev, or SQS | Managed, retries built-in |
| Storage | S3 / R2 / Supabase Storage | Cheap, reliable |
| DNS | Cloudflare | Fast, free tier |
| Secrets | Environment variables via platform | Never in code or git |
Incident Response
- Detect — alert fires or user report
- Acknowledge — someone owns it (within 5 min)
- Mitigate — rollback, feature flag off, or scale up (fix the bleeding)
- Investigate — root cause after bleeding stops
- Fix — proper fix with tests
- Postmortem — blameless, focus on systems not people