Project 10: GitOps Platform Capstone

Integrate artifact trust, reconciliation, policy enforcement, observability, and recovery drills into one platform operating model.

Quick Reference

Attribute Value
Difficulty Expert
Time Estimate 20-40 hours
Main Programming Language YAML + automation scripts
Alternative Programming Languages Go, Python
Coolness Level Level 4 - Full-System Mastery
Business Potential 5. Platform Product
Prerequisites Projects P02, P06, P07, P08, P09
Key Topics GitOps reconciliation, release gates, SLO guardrails, rollback drills

1. Learning Objectives

  1. Build a coherent platform operating model, not a tool collection.
  2. Implement end-to-end release gates from artifact trust to runtime health.
  3. Exercise rollback and disaster drills with measurable outcomes.
  4. Document ownership boundaries and escalation flow.

2. All Theory Needed (Per-Concept Breakdown)

2.1 GitOps as Continuous Convergence

Fundamentals

GitOps treats versioned config as desired truth and continuously reconciles runtime state.

Deep Dive into the concept

GitOps is effective when repository structure, promotion policy, and secret handling are explicit. It reduces drift and improves auditability but requires operational discipline: environment overlays, change review, and controlled rollback paths. Drift detection should include both config drift and behavioral drift (SLO regression).

2.2 Release Governance and Reliability Controls

Fundamentals

Safe delivery requires layered gates: artifact trust, policy compliance, runtime health, and SLO checks.

Deep Dive into the concept

A robust release pipeline includes immutable artifact promotion, policy checks, staged rollout, automated health evaluation, and rollback triggers. Stateful workloads require additional guardrails for data safety and migration reversibility.

3. Project Specification

3.1 What You Will Build

A platform blueprint with:

  • Git-driven environment promotion
  • policy and security gates
  • rollout and rollback automation
  • incident and recovery runbooks

3.2 Functional Requirements

  1. Promote release by digest with signed metadata.
  2. Enforce admission and policy checks before deploy.
  3. Run staged canary rollout with health gates.
  4. Roll back automatically or manually on failure criteria.

3.3 Non-Functional Requirements

  • Performance: release decision latency acceptable for CI cadence.
  • Reliability: rollback success in repeated drills.
  • Usability: clear operator dashboards and runbooks.

3.7 Real World Outcome

$ ./platform-capstone release --version 2026-02-11
checks:
  artifact_signature: pass
  vulnerability_policy: pass
  admission_policy: pass
rollout:
  canary_10: healthy
  canary_50: healthy
  full_100: healthy
result: release complete with audit trail id rel-2026-02-11-01

$ ./platform-capstone drill --scenario rollback
rollback: success in 2m04s
post_check: error budget and latency returned to baseline

4. Solution Architecture

4.1 High-Level Design

git repos -> reconciler -> cluster state
          -> policy gates -> rollout controller -> observability guardrails -> rollback

4.2 Key Components

Component Responsibility Key Decisions
Promotion engine move digest across envs immutable references only
Policy gates enforce security/compliance phased rule severity
Rollout controller staged deploy decisions SLO-based progression
Recovery runner rollback and failover drills deterministic runbooks

5. Implementation Guide

5.3 The Core Question You’re Answering

“Can this platform deliver change quickly while preserving safety, observability, and recovery confidence?”

5.6 Milestones

  1. Define platform contracts and repo structure.
  2. Implement release gates and staged rollout.
  3. Add SLO-driven rollback triggers.
  4. Run game-day drills and document outcomes.

5.9 Definition of Done

  • End-to-end release path runs on immutable artifacts.
  • Policy gates and health gates are enforced.
  • Rollback drill passes with measured timings.
  • Architecture and ownership docs are complete.