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Deployment & Operations

Section: 8-deployment-operations
Document: Complete DevOps Guide
Audience: DevOps Engineers, SREs, Developers
Last Updated: 2025-12-30

🎯 Overview

Complete deployment and operations guide for MachineAvatars platform covering 23 microservices, CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and operational procedures.

Deployment Philosophy:

  • 🤖 Automation First - Minimize manual interventions
  • 🔒 Safety - Zero-downtime deployments, easy rollbacks
  • 👀 Observability - Monitor everything, alert proactively
  • 📖 Documentation - Runbooks for all procedures

Emergency Procedures

Common Operations

🌍 Environments

Development (Local)

  • Purpose: Local development and testing
  • Services: Docker Compose (all 23 services)
  • Databases: MongoDB + Milvus (local containers)
  • Secrets: .env file (not committed)

QA/Staging

  • Purpose: Pre-production testing
  • Infrastructure: Azure (dedicated resource group)
  • Services: Azure Container Apps (1-2 replicas)
  • Databases: Dedicated Cosmos DB + shared Milvus

Production

  • Purpose: Live customer traffic
  • Infrastructure: Azure (multi-region)
  • Services: Azure Container Apps (2-10 replicas with auto-scaling)
  • Databases: Multi-region Cosmos DB + dedicated Milvus
  • High Availability: Yes (99.9% SLA)

🔄 Deployment Pipeline

Build → Test → Deploy Flow

graph LR
    A[Code Push] --> B[GitHub Actions]
    B --> C{Tests Pass?}
    C -->|No| D[Block Deployment]
    C -->|Yes| E[Build Docker Image]
    E --> F[Security Scan]
    F --> G{Vulnerabilities?}
    G -->|Critical| D
    G -->|None/Low| H[Push to ACR]
    H --> I{Target Environment}
    I -->|Staging| J[Auto-Deploy Staging]
    I -->|Production| K[Manual Approval]
    K --> L[Deploy Production]
    L --> M[Health Checks]
    M --> N{Healthy?}
    N -->|No| O[Auto-Rollback]
    N -->|Yes| P[Deployment Complete]

    style C fill:#FFF3E0
    style G fill:#FFCDD2
    style K fill:#C5E1A5
    style N fill:#FFF3E0

Pipeline Components:

  1. Automated Testing - Unit, integration, security scans
  2. Docker Build - Multi-stage builds for optimization
  3. Registry Push - Azure Container Registry
  4. Deployment - Azure Container Apps with health checks
  5. Monitoring - Real-time alerts during deployment

📊 Key Metrics (DORA)

Deployment Frequency

  • Current: 3-5 deploys/week
  • Target: Daily deployments
  • Elite: Multiple deploys/day

Lead Time for Changes

  • Current: 2-4 hours (code commit → production)
  • Target: <1 hour
  • Elite: <1 hour

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

  • Current: 30 minutes
  • Target: <15 minutes
  • Elite: <1 hour

Change Failure Rate

  • Current: 5% (1 in 20 deployments needs rollback)
  • Target: <5%
  • Elite: 0-15%

📁 Documentation Structure

Part 1: Setup & Configuration

🛠️ Technology Stack

CI/CD

  • GitHub Actions - CI/CD orchestration
  • Docker - Containerization
  • Azure Container Registry - Image storage
  • Trivy/Snyk - Security scanning

Deployment

  • Azure Container Apps - Container hosting
  • Azure CLI - Deployment automation
  • Helm (planned) - Kubernetes deployments

Monitoring

  • Loki - Log aggregation
  • Grafana - Dashboards
  • Azure Monitor - Infrastructure metrics
  • PagerDuty - On-call alerting

🚨 On-Call & Incident Response

On-Call Schedule

  • Primary: DevOps Engineer (rotating weekly)
  • Secondary: Backend Lead
  • Escalation: CTO

Incident Severity

Severity Response Time Escalation Examples
P0 Immediate All hands Complete outage, data loss
P1 <15 min Primary + Secondary Major feature down, DB issues
P2 <1 hour Primary only Degraded performance
P3 Next business day Backlog Minor bugs, improvements

Incident Checklist

  1. Acknowledge - Respond to alert within 5 minutes
  2. Assess - Determine severity and impact
  3. Communicate - Update status page, notify stakeholders
  4. Mitigate - Apply fix or rollback
  5. Resolve - Verify fix, monitor for 1 hour
  6. Post-Mortem - Document incident, create action items

📈 Deployment Best Practices

Pre-Deployment

  • ✅ All tests passing (unit, integration, E2E)
  • ✅ Security scans passed (no critical vulnerabilities)
  • ✅ Database migrations reviewed and tested
  • ✅ Rollback plan documented
  • ✅ On-call engineer notified
  • ✅ Deployment window scheduled (avoid peak hours)

During Deployment

  • 👀 Monitor error rates in real-time
  • 👀 Watch response latency (p95, p99)
  • 👀 Check health endpoints
  • 👀 Monitor resource usage (CPU, memory)

Post-Deployment

  • ✅ Run smoke tests
  • ✅ Verify key user flows
  • ✅ Monitor for 1 hour minimum
  • ✅ Check alert channels (ensure no incidents)
  • ✅ Mark deployment complete in tracking system

Architecture:

Security:

Data:

📞 Support & Escalation

DevOps Team:

  • Slack: #devops-support
  • Email: devops@machineavatars.com
  • On-Call: PagerDuty (24/7)

Escalation Path:

  1. On-call DevOps Engineer
  2. Backend Engineering Lead
  3. CTO

Progress: Section 8 - ⅛ files complete (12.5%)

"Deploy early, deploy often, deploy safely." 🚀✅