Season 8: You Own the Release · Episode 3 of 8
The Environment Is Part of the Code
You play: AI Engineering Intern
Included with Core programme and Certification prep
The situation
assist-service runs in staging and fails in production, and no one can say what is different. Both environments were built by hand, months apart, by different people. Today the environment stops being something people remember and becomes something declared, compared and applied.
What you'll learn
- Infrastructure as code: parameterised templates, declared-versus-observed state, reviewed plans, scoped deployment identities and workload federation; distinguish fixture snapshot restore from a production rollback or backup strategy.
- ARM and Bicep, desired state configuration, Azure Deployment Environments, service principals versus system- and user-assigned managed identities, OIDC federation and Azure Key Vault.
Who you work with
Priya Naidoo
Cloud Architect
Kabelo Mokoena
Platform and DevOps Engineer
Lydia Roe
Security Engineer
Scenes
- 1.Staging works. Production doesn't.
- 2.Missing, drifted, unmanaged, or fine?
- 3.Turn staging into a template
- 4.The deploy identity should deploy, and nothing else
- 5.Fix production the way it was declared
- 6.No secret in the pipeline
- 7.Handover
What you leave with
You turned a hand-built staging environment into a parameterised template, built production from it, scoped the deployment identity to production instead of the whole subscription, and resolved a drifted production with a previewed, identity-scoped apply that can be rolled back. You also chose workload identity federation over a stored secret.