Workflows
Repeatable engineering workflows with explicit verification.
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Restore a Production Backup and Prove It Works
Restore a production backup into an isolated database, verify row counts and application queries, and measure the real recovery time before an incident demands it.
Review a Third-Party Vendor Before Contract Renewal
Assess a vendor's security evidence, data flows, reliability history and exit options before renewal, then record a decision with named owners and dated follow-ups.
Rotate Database Application Credentials Without Downtime
Replace an application database password in controlled phases: create a successor role, migrate every consumer, confirm zero old connections, then disable the old login.
Run a Tabletop Exercise for a Critical Incident
Rehearse a realistic outage with responders and a facilitator, inject pressure over ninety minutes, and convert observations into owned, dated remediation work.
Upgrade PostgreSQL a Major Version with a Rehearsed Cutover
Move a production PostgreSQL cluster to the next major version with a rehearsed pg_upgrade run, a verified backup and a cutover that can fall back to the old cluster.
Backfill a Large Table Safely
Backfill data in small idempotent batches, track a watermark, throttle writes, verify coverage, and avoid long locks or replication lag.
Blue-Green Deployment with a Reversible Switch
Run two identical environments, deploy to the idle color, verify it against production checks, switch traffic atomically, and keep a tested rollback path.
Rotate TLS Certificates Without Downtime
Inventory certificates, issue replacements, deploy them with overlap, verify the served chain and expiry, and automate renewal before expiration becomes an outage.
Run a Controlled Chaos Experiment
State a falsifiable resilience hypothesis, define steady state and blast radius, inject one failure, and abort automatically if the guardrail trips.
Configure Log Retention and Archival
Classify logs by purpose and sensitivity, set hot/warm/cold retention, archive to object storage, and prove deletion without losing audit evidence.
Create a Database Index Without Downtime
Build an index concurrently, detect invalid builds, watch replication lag, and avoid locking writes on a large production table.
Implement a Data Retention Cleanup
Inventory data by class, define retention and deletion rules, dry-run the cleanup, delete in bounded batches, and verify while preserving audit evidence.
Run a Database Failover Drill
Practice promoting a replica, reconnecting the application, verifying writes, and switching back before a real outage forces an untested failover.
Define Incident Severity Levels
Classify incidents by customer impact and urgency, assign paging and communication rules, and avoid every alert becoming a SEV1.
Plan a Major Dependency Upgrade
Read the migration guide, isolate the upgrade in a branch, run codemods and compatibility tests, canary the change, and keep a tested rollback.
Run a Multi-Region Failover Drill
Simulate loss of a primary region, shift traffic to a secondary, verify data freshness and writes, then fail back without leaving split-brain risk.
Run an On-Call Handoff
Transfer on-call responsibility with current incidents, risky changes, capacity notes, alert noise, and explicit ownership so nothing depends on memory.
Triage a Performance Regression
Confirm a latency or throughput regression against a baseline, narrow it to a change or dependency, mitigate safely, and add a guardrail that catches the next one.
Run a Production Access Review
Inventory production identities and permissions, remove stale or excessive access, verify MFA and break-glass paths, and schedule the next review.
Run a Production Readiness Review
Review a service before launch across ownership, SLOs, capacity, security, observability, failure handling, data safety, and rollback.
Retire a Feature Flag Safely
Confirm full rollout, remove the old code path and flag checks, deploy in the safe order, and delete the flag configuration without leaving dead branches.
Review API Contract Changes Before Merge
Diff the OpenAPI document, classify changes as breaking or compatible, collect consumer impact, and require a migration plan for breaking changes.
Rotate API Keys Without Breaking Clients
Issue a new key, accept old and new during a migration window, track client usage, and revoke the old key only after every caller has moved.
Plan a Schema Migration Rollback
Design a database migration that can be rolled back without data loss, rehearse it on a copy, measure lock impact, and keep old and new application versions compatible.
Security Incident Response Runbook
Contain a suspected credential compromise, preserve evidence, rotate affected secrets, eradicate persistence, and recover with verification and clear communication.
Accessibility Audit Workflow
Combine automated checks with keyboard and screen-reader testing, fix findings by severity, and add regression checks for critical journeys.
API Versioning and Sunset Release
Introduce a new API version, migrate consumers with measured adoption, announce deprecation with standard headers, and remove the old version only after traffic reaches zero.
Backup and Restore Drill
Prove that backups are usable by restoring them into an isolated environment, verifying data integrity, measuring recovery time, and documenting gaps.
Blameless Postmortem Workflow
Reconstruct an incident timeline, identify contributing system causes, assign verifiable action items, and review completion without blaming individuals.
Canary Release with Metric Gates
Route a small slice of traffic to a new version, compare it against the stable baseline on explicit metrics, and promote or roll back based on evidence.
Dependency Upgrade Workflow
Upgrade dependencies in small, reversible batches with lockfile verification, vulnerability checks, tests, staging validation, and a rollback plan.
Expand-Contract Database Migration
Ship a schema change in backward-compatible phases so old and new application versions can run simultaneously during a rolling deployment.
Feature Flag Staged Rollout
Release a feature behind a flag, expose it to progressively larger audiences, monitor impact, and remove the flag after full rollout or rollback.
Incident Response Runbook
Detect, declare, mitigate, communicate, and review an incident with explicit roles and evidence, prioritizing restoration over root-cause analysis during the outage.
Load Test Before Launch
Define realistic scenarios, measure baseline and peak behavior, identify saturation points, and decide capacity with evidence instead of guesses.
Scheduled Secret Rotation Workflow
Rotate credentials with overlapping validity, update consumers in a controlled order, verify access, and revoke the old version without downtime.