Engineering Standards

How we build, deploy, and maintain mission-critical infrastructure. These are the internal standards enforced across every client engagement to ensure reliability, security, and velocity.

01Infrastructure Design Principles

  • Immutable Infrastructure: Servers are never modified after deployment. If an update is needed, a new image is deployed.

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): 100% of cloud resources must be provisioned via Terraform or Pulumi.

  • Least Privilege: IAM roles must be strictly scoped to the exact permissions required by the application.

  • Zero Trust Networking: Internal microservices must authenticate and authorize requests via mutual TLS (mTLS).

02Terraform Standards

  • State Management: Remote state must use S3 with DynamoDB locking (or equivalent). Local state is strictly prohibited.

  • Module Strategy: Use officially supported provider modules where possible. Custom modules must be versioned and tagged.

  • Formatting: Code must pass `terraform fmt` and `tflint` in CI before merge.

  • Secrets: Never hardcode secrets in `.tf` files. Inject via AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault.

03CI/CD & Git Branching

  • Trunk-Based Development: Short-lived feature branches merged directly into main.

  • Ephemeral Environments: PRs automatically trigger the creation of a temporary testing environment that is destroyed on merge.

  • Automated Testing: Infrastructure changes must include policy-as-code tests (e.g., Checkov, OPA).

  • Deployment: Fully automated pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI). No manual SSH deployments.

04Monitoring & Logging

  • Metrics: Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog. Define SLOs and SLIs for all critical user journeys.

  • Alerting: Alerts must be actionable. Route critical pages to PagerDuty; route warnings to Slack.

  • Logging: Structured JSON logging only. Centralized log aggregation (Elasticsearch, Loki, or CloudWatch).

  • Tracing: OpenTelemetry implemented across all microservices for distributed tracing.

05Security Baselines

  • Vulnerability Scanning: Container images scanned during CI and continuously at runtime.

  • Secrets Management: SealedSecrets (Kubernetes) or external secret operators.

  • Encryption: Encryption at rest (KMS) and in transit (TLS 1.3) is mandatory.

  • Compliance: Architectures must be designed to pass SOC2 Type II and GDPR requirements out of the box.

06Disaster Recovery & Backups

  • RTO/RPO: Clearly defined Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives for every data store.

  • Automated Backups: Database snapshots automated daily, retained for 35 days standard.

  • Cross-Region: Mission-critical databases must replicate cross-region.

  • Game Days: Quarterly disaster recovery simulations to test runbooks.