/silver:devops

Overview

/silver:devops is the Silver Bullet orchestrator for infrastructure, CI/CD, pipelines, Terraform, IaC, Kubernetes, containers, cloud, and ops work.

silver:devops uses composable flows architecture — it selects from the 18-flow catalog and composes a chain suited to infrastructure work. Typical paths: FLOW 0 (BOOTSTRAP) → FLOW 1 (ORIENT) → FLOW 5 (PLAN) → FLOW 7 (EXECUTE) → FLOW 9 (REVIEW) → FLOW 10 (SECURE) → FLOW 11 (VERIFY) → FLOW 12 (QUALITY GATE) → FLOW 13 (SHIP). Blast-radius analysis is inserted between ORIENT and PLAN instead of brainstorming paths. See Composable Flows for the full catalog.

Key design principles:

• No brainstorming phase — infrastructure changes are driven by operational requirements established upstream (in silver:feature or silver:research). Blast-radius analysis replaces the product/engineering brainstorm.
• 7 IaC quality dimensions instead of the product 8 core dimensions plus conditional gates — at both pre-plan and pre-ship gates. Usability and AI/LLM safety are excluded when they do not apply; infrastructure-specific concerns such as observability and change-safety are emphasized.
• TDD explicitly skipped — infrastructure and configuration work is declarative; there is no red-green-refactor cycle that applies to IaC resources.

When to use

Entry trigger signals for /silver:devops:

• "infra" / "CI/CD" / "deploy" / "pipeline"
• "terraform" / "IaC" / "kubernetes" / "container"
• "cloud" / "ops" / "infrastructure" / "GitHub Actions"

7 IaC quality dimensions

These replace the standard product/software quality gate for all infra work. Applied at both pre-plan (Step 3) and pre-ship (Step 10) gates:

• Reliability — failure modes, retry logic, health checks
• Security — secrets handling, IAM boundaries, network exposure
• Scalability — resource limits, auto-scaling, capacity planning
• Modularity — reusable modules, clear boundaries, minimal coupling
• Testability — infrastructure can be validated without production deployment
• Observability — logging, metrics, alerting, tracing integration
• Change-safety — idempotency, drift prevention, rollback plan

Workflow steps

Pre-flight

Silver Bullet reads silver-bullet.md §10 to load user workflow preferences before any step executes.

Step 0 — Codebase and infrastructure orientation

Invoke gsd-scan to understand current infra topology before blast-radius analysis. If deeper mapping is needed, invoke /gsd:map-codebase.

Step 1 — Blast radius analysis

Invoke /silver:blast-radius. Purpose: map change scope, downstream dependencies, failure modes, and rollback plan. This step replaces the product/engineering brainstorm for devops workflows. Produces a LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH/CRITICAL rating (see table below).

Step 2 — DevOps skill router

Invoke /devops-skill-router. Purpose: route to the right IaC/cloud skill — Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, k8s, or other tooling appropriate for the change.

Step 3 — Pre-plan DevOps quality gates (7 IaC dimensions)

Invoke /devops-quality-gates. All 7 IaC-adapted dimensions run as the pre-plan gate. Not the standard product/software /silver:quality-gates — the devops workflow uses /devops-quality-gates exclusively at both quality gate positions.

Step 3b — Infrastructure security (mandatory, non-skippable)

Review the security findings from /devops-quality-gates before planning. Secrets, IAM permissions, network exposure, and data handling must be addressed as design requirements before gsd:plan-phase runs.

Step 4 — Discuss phase

Invoke gsd:discuss-phase. DevOps phase context → CONTEXT.md with locked decisions for the planner.

Step 5 — Plan phase

Invoke gsd:plan-phase. Produces PLAN.md for the infrastructure change.

Step 6 — Execute phase (TDD skipped)

Invoke gsd:execute-phase (Interactive) or gsd:autonomous (Autonomous §10e).

TDD is explicitly skipped for infra plans — not applicable. Infrastructure and configuration work is declarative; there is no red-green-refactor cycle that applies to IaC resources. No tdd invocation.

Step 7 — Code review (IaC review)

Run review sequence: /requesting-code-review → gsd:code-review → [if issues: gsd:code-review-fix] → [for arch-significant infra: gsd:review --all] → /receiving-code-review.

Step 8 — IaC security and secrets verification

Invoke gsd:secure-phase. Confirms no credentials in code, correct IAM boundaries, secure defaults.

Step 9 — Deployment verification

Invoke gsd:verify-work. Deployment verification and UAT. Non-skippable gate.

Step 10 — Pre-ship DevOps quality gates (7 IaC dimensions)

Invoke /devops-quality-gates again. Final 7-dimension sweep before deploy — same gate as Step 3, applied post-implementation. Non-skippable gate.

Step 11 — Ship / deploy

Invoke gsd:ship. Push branch, deploy, create PR.

Blast radius levels

The blast radius assessment in Step 1 produces one of four ratings. The rating informs the scope of change-safety review and approval requirements:

Non-skippable gates

Example invocation

Silver Bullet routes to devops workflow. Intel → blast-radius (likely LOW/MEDIUM) → devops-skill-router selects GitHub Actions tooling → 7 IaC quality gates → discuss → plan → execute (no TDD) → IaC code review → secrets verification → deployment verification → pre-ship quality gates → ship.