What a Mid-level } should know

Independently writes Ansible playbooks and roles for platform infrastructure provisioning including Kubernetes cluster bootstrapping, certificate management, and observability stack deployment. Implements reusable platform automation modules with dynamic inventories, vault-encrypted secrets, and environment-specific variable hierarchies. Structures platform automation as self-service roles enabling development teams to provision standardized infrastructure components.

Manages platform AWS infrastructure: EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, SQS/SNS. Configures AWS Organizations and multi-account strategy for environment isolation. Uses AWS Config and CloudTrail for compliance. Optimizes costs through Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.

Manages platform CDN infrastructure: cache policies, origin failover, WAF rules. Configures edge functions (CloudFront Functions, Cloudflare Workers) for routing and A/B testing. Optimizes TTFB and cache hit ratio for platform services.

Integrates security scanning into the platform CI/CD pipeline: automated Trivy/Snyk on every PR. Configures deployment blocking policies for critical CVEs. Manages allow-lists for known false positives and creates vulnerability triage process for platform components.

Independently configures and manages Crossplane. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Optimizes Docker images for platform services: minimal base images (distroless, Alpine), security scanning in CI. Configures private registries (Harbor, ECR) with retention and rotation policies. Creates standardized base images for development teams as part of the golden path.

Independently configures and manages Envoy Proxy. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Independently configures and manages Google Cloud Platform. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Creates custom Helm charts for platform services with templating (helpers, named templates). Configures Helmfile for declarative management of multiple releases. Uses OCI-based registry for chart storage. Implements hooks and tests for deployment validation.

Independently configures and manages Istio Service Mesh. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Creates Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for automating platform processes. Configures Pod Security Standards and Network Policies for multi-tenant clusters. Manages stateful applications through operators (etcd, PostgreSQL). Optimizes scheduler and affinity rules.

Manages production workloads on the platform: HPA, PDB, topology spread constraints. Configures persistent storage through StorageClass and PVC. Works with ServiceAccount and RBAC for service authentication. Configures resource requests/limits with QoS class awareness.

Designs load balancing for the platform: weighted routing for canary, path-based routing for multi-service. Configures global load balancing (Route53, Global Accelerator). Optimizes connection draining and idle timeout. Implements WAF at load balancer level for platform protection.

Designs network topology for platform services: VPC peering, Transit Gateway, DNS zones. Configures Kubernetes network policies (Calico, Cilium) for tenant isolation. Implements mTLS between services. Optimizes latency through topology-aware routing.

Independently configures and manages Pulumi. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Independently configures and manages Serverless Containers. Writes IaC for typical tasks. Understands networking and security basics.

Develops serverless platform components: event-driven processing of infrastructure events, custom resource handlers for CloudFormation/CDK. Optimizes cold starts through provisioned concurrency. Configures observability for serverless (X-Ray, structured logging).

Creates Terraform modules for standardized provisioning of platform infrastructure: EKS clusters, network topology, IAM roles. Configures remote state (S3 + DynamoDB) and workspaces. Implements pre-commit hooks (tflint, tfsec) and automated plan in PRs.

Independently configures ArgoCD as the deployment engine for the internal developer platform. Writes ApplicationSets with matrix and merge generators for multi-cluster platform service delivery. Implements ArgoCD project isolation, sync windows for change management, and webhook integrations for platform CI/CD orchestration.

Configures blue-green deployment for platform services: DNS-based or load balancer switching. Automates smoke tests between switches. Manages databases during blue-green (backward compatible migrations). Creates runbooks for blue-green procedures.

Configures canary deployment through Argo Rollouts: AnalysisTemplate, traffic management via Istio/NGINX. Defines canary metrics (error rate, latency p99, saturation). Automates promotion/rollback based on analysis runs. Creates canary templates for platform teams.

Integrates feature flag system into the platform: SDK configuration for microservices, server-side evaluation. Configures segmentation and A/B testing. Creates standard flag usage patterns for teams. Implements observability for feature flag impact analysis.

Develops reusable workflows for standardizing CI/CD on the platform: composite actions, workflow dispatch. Configures self-hosted runners for private infrastructure. Optimizes CI time through dependency caching and parallel jobs. Creates custom actions.

Creates templated CI/CD pipelines (include/extends) for standardizing platform processes. Configures GitLab Runner fleet with autoscaling in Kubernetes. Implements parent-child pipelines for complex deployments. Uses environments and review apps for preview.

Builds GitOps platform: configures ArgoCD in multi-tenant mode with per-team RBAC, creates ApplicationSets for automated onboarding, implements template repositories for standardized deployment configs. Configures notification system for sync failures.

Independently creates and maintains Progressive Delivery pipelines. Configures CI/CD pipelines. Automates routine operations.

Integrates chaos engineering into the platform: installs and configures Chaos Mesh/Litmus as platform service, creates experiment templates for developer self-service. Ensures isolation: chaos experiments don't escape target namespace.