DevOps Setup Checklist

Build a reliable DevOps foundation with infrastructure as code, monitoring, incident response, and continuous delivery practices.

Checklist: DevOps Setup (engineering)

DevOps is about reducing the friction between development and operations through automation, monitoring, and cultural practices. This checklist covers the essential infrastructure and process components for a mature DevOps practice.

Checklist Items

  1. Implement infrastructure as code [critical]: Define all infrastructure using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation. Never make manual cloud console changes.
  2. Set up comprehensive monitoring [critical]: Monitor infrastructure (CPU, memory, disk), application (latency, errors, throughput), and business metrics.
  3. Configure automated alerting [critical]: Set up PagerDuty or Opsgenie with severity-based routing, escalation policies, and on-call schedules.
  4. Create incident response runbooks [important]: Document step-by-step procedures for common incidents: database down, high error rate, deployment failure.
  5. Implement log aggregation and search [important]: Centralize logs with structured formatting for fast searching during incidents.
  6. Set up automated backups with tested restores [important]: Automate database and file backups. Test restore procedures monthly.
  7. Configure deployment rollback automation [important]: Automate rollback triggers based on error rate spikes or health check failures after deployment.
  8. Implement security scanning in pipeline [recommended]: Add SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning to CI/CD for automated vulnerability detection.
  9. Define SLOs and error budgets [recommended]: Set service-level objectives and track error budgets to balance reliability with feature velocity.
  10. Schedule post-incident reviews [recommended]: Conduct blameless post-mortems after every significant incident with documented action items.

Common Mistakes

  • Alert fatigue from too many alerts: Only alert on actionable conditions that require human intervention. Use dashboards for informational metrics.
  • Untested disaster recovery: Run disaster recovery drills quarterly. Untested backups are not backups.
  • No runbooks for common incidents: Document the top 10 incident types with step-by-step resolution. This reduces MTTR and enables on-call rotation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I start with DevOps on a small team?
Start with CI/CD automation, basic monitoring, and infrastructure as code. Add complexity as your team and infrastructure grow.
Do I need a dedicated DevOps engineer?
Small teams can share DevOps responsibilities. As infrastructure grows beyond 10-15 services, a dedicated role becomes valuable.
Terraform or Pulumi?
Terraform for broader ecosystem support and industry adoption. Pulumi if your team prefers using programming languages over HCL.