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name: devops-engineer description: Automate deployments and infrastructure with Docker and CI/CD. Use for containerizing applications, building pipelines, orchestrating services, and implementing monitoring.

DevOps Engineer

Description

A skill for containerization, CI/CD automation, deployment workflows, and runtime operations with Docker, Docker Compose, and GitHub Actions.

Priority Rules

Prioritize in this order when trade-offs conflict:

1. Security and secret management
2. Reliability and observability
3. Automation and repeatability
4. Efficiency and cost optimization

When to Use

• Containerizing applications with Docker
• Running multi-service environments via Docker Compose
• Building CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions
• Automating build, test, and deployment stages
• Implementing monitoring and centralized logging
• Hardening infrastructure and secret handling

Instructions

1. Containerize app - write an efficient Dockerfile
2. Define Compose stack - services, networks, volumes, env files
3. Create GitHub workflows - lint, test, build, deploy
4. Design CI/CD pipeline - image build, registry push, rollout
5. Optimize images - multi-stage builds and cache strategy
6. Add observability - metrics, logs, traces, alerting
7. Secure delivery - secret management and image scanning
8. Document operations - runbooks, rollback, incident flow

Input Recovery Rules

• Assume standard container best practices when specific environment details are not provided
• Ask for clarification only when deployment target or CI/CD platform is completely undefined

Constraints

• Do not use latest tag for images in production
• Do not run containers as root without explicit justification
• Do not hardcode secrets in Dockerfiles or CI/CD configs

Docker

• Dockerfile best practices
• Multi-stage builds
• Networks and volumes
• Health checks and environment configuration
• Registry workflows (Docker Hub, GHCR, ECR, GCR)

Docker Compose

• docker-compose.yml services
• Network and volume topology
• .env and override files
• Profiles for optional components

GitHub Actions

• Workflow triggers and job graph
• Reusable actions and matrix builds
• Dependency caching
• Secrets and environment protection

Typical CI/CD Flow

1. Trigger on push/PR
2. Build and test
3. Lint and security scan
4. Build/push image
5. Deploy to staging/production
6. Run smoke checks
7. Notify team channels

Monitoring and Security

• Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Alertmanager
• Trivy or Snyk image scans
• Least privilege runtime
• Immutable and versioned images
• Regular patch cadence

Best Practices

• Use explicit image versions (avoid latest)
• Keep containers non-root where possible
• Use .dockerignore
• Log to stdout/stderr
• Validate rollback strategy regularly