Engineering Patterns¶
Patterns that survive contact with production.
This is a growing collection of engineering patterns distilled from real-world DevSecOps automation. Each pattern addresses a specific challenge in building resilient, secure systems across the software development lifecycle.
What Makes a Pattern
Every pattern here has been:
- Battle-tested in production environments
- Documented with clear tradeoffs and decision criteria
- Illustrated with concrete implementation examples
Pattern Overview¶
| Category | Pattern | Question | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Implementation | Idempotency | "Safe to repeat?" | Make reruns safe |
| Implementation | Fail Fast | "Is something wrong?" | Stop immediately |
| Implementation | Prerequisite Checks | "Can it succeed?" | Validate before starting |
| Implementation | Work Avoidance | "Already done?" | Skip redundant work |
| Workflow | Three-Stage Design | "How to structure?" | Separate discovery, execution, reporting |
| Workflow | Matrix Distribution | "How to parallelize?" | Dynamic matrix strategies |
Available Patterns¶
Idempotency¶
Build automation that survives reruns. When workflows fail mid-execution, idempotent operations let you click "rerun" without fear of duplicates, corruption, or cascading failures.
Start Here If...
- Your workflows create duplicate PRs on rerun
- You manually clean up state after failed jobs
- You're afraid to rerun scheduled automation
Workflow Patterns¶
Structural patterns for building scalable, maintainable CI/CD workflows. Learn how to separate concerns, parallelize operations, and handle complex multi-target scenarios.
Start Here If...
- Your workflows are becoming hard to maintain
- You need to process many targets (repos, services, files)
- You want clear observability into what happened
Coming Soon¶
Growing Collection
This section expands as patterns are documented. Upcoming topics include:
- Fail Fast - Stop immediately when something is wrong
- Prerequisite Checks - Validate conditions before starting work
- Work Avoidance - Skip work that's already done
- Error Handling - Fail loudly, recover gracefully
- Change Detection - Know when something actually changed
- Rate Limiting - Respect API boundaries at scale
- State Management - Track progress across distributed operations
Check the Roadmap for the full list.