What I Check During a DevOps Infrastructure Audit: 50-Point Production Checklist
The 6 Pillars of Production Health
My audit framework is derived from over a decade of hands-on production engineering and aligns with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and CIS Benchmarks.
1. Identity, Access & Perimeter Defense
- Root Account Lockdown: Is root MFA hardware-backed (FIDO/YubiKey)? Are root API access keys completely deleted?
- IAM Least Privilege: Zero wildcard
"Action": "*"permissions. Are developer credentials routed through AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO) with temporary session credentials? - Access Key Hygiene: Automated alert for any IAM user access key older than 90 days.
- Network Isolation: Zero databases (RDS, Aurora, MongoDB) or caches (ElastiCache, Redis) residing in public subnets or accessible via public IP.
- Security Groups: Ensure no security groups have ingress
0.0.0.0/0on administrative ports (SSH 22, RDP 3389, Kube-apiserver 6443). - WAF & Shield: AWS WAF rules active against OWASP Top 10, rate limiting brute-force endpoints.
2. Cluster Architecture & Pod Security
- Pod Security Standards: Are namespaces enforcing
baselineorrestrictedstandards? Zero containers running as root (runAsNonRoot: true). - Resource Limits & Requests: Every single pod must define explicit
requestsandlimitsfor both CPU and memory to prevent noisy-neighbor starvation and node eviction. - Probe Configuration: Validation that liveness probes are shallow and readiness probes correctly detach traffic during startup.
- Control Plane Redundancy: Multi-AZ control plane and worker nodes distributed across at least 3 Availability Zones with topology spread constraints.
- Network Policies: Default-deny ingress/egress network policies preventing lateral movement between namespaces.
3. High Availability & Disaster Recovery
- RTO & RPO Benchmarks: Documented, tested Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- Automated Backup Drills: Are database snapshots regularly restored into isolated test environments to verify data integrity?
- Cross-Region Replication: Critical S3 buckets and database backups mirrored to an alternate AWS region with KMS cross-region keys.
- Circuit Breakers: Client timeouts, retries with exponential backoff, and jitter configured on all inter-service communications.
4. CI/CD, Observability & FinOps
- CI/CD Security: Keyless OIDC authentication for GitHub Actions, immutable container tags, automated container vulnerability scanning with Trivy.
- Observability (The 4 Golden Signals): Dashboards and PagerDuty alerts configured for Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation across all user-facing services.
- FinOps & Rightsizing: Zero unattached EBS volumes, legacy gp2 migrated to gp3, VPC endpoints configured to eliminate NAT Gateway fees, and Karpenter Spot consolidation active.
Have questions about this architecture or scaling your infrastructure?
Whether you're planning a complex cloud migration, optimizing Kubernetes reliability, or designing autonomous AI workflows, I'm always open to discussing architecture and technical challenges with engineering teams.
Connect with Naveed on LinkedIn →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary deliverable of a DevOps infrastructure audit?
The primary deliverable is an executive and technical findings report detailing: 1) High-severity security vulnerabilities and immediate exposure risks, 2) Single Points of Failure (SPOFs) threatening SLA uptime, 3) Concrete FinOps cost-reduction opportunities with projected dollar savings, and 4) A prioritized 30/60/90-day remediation roadmap.
How long does a production DevOps infrastructure audit take?
A thorough audit of a cloud environment (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and Observability) typically takes 5 to 10 business days, consisting of read-only architecture inspection, automated configuration scans, and interviews with lead engineers and stakeholders.
Does performing an infrastructure audit require write access or cause downtime?
Never. A professional infrastructure audit is performed entirely via read-only IAM roles (e.g. AWS SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess policies) and non-invasive inspection tools. It requires zero downtime and makes zero changes to live production systems.
