DevOps

Overview

DevOps at Stripe Systems is not a separate team or an add-on service — it is a set of practices embedded into every project from sprint zero. Infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, and security are first-class concerns alongside application code.

All infrastructure is defined as code using Terraform with modular, reusable configurations. Environments (development, staging, production) are provisioned from the same templates with environment-specific variables, eliminating configuration drift. State is managed remotely with locking to prevent concurrent modification conflicts.

CI/CD pipelines are configured using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps depending on your existing toolchain. A typical pipeline includes: linting and static analysis, unit and integration test execution, container image building with multi-stage Dockerfiles, security scanning (Trivy for container vulnerabilities, Snyk for dependency CVEs, SAST with SonarQube), and automated deployment to staging with promotion gates for production.

Container orchestration uses Kubernetes for production workloads requiring horizontal auto-scaling, rolling deployments, and service mesh capabilities. For simpler deployments, we use managed container services (AWS ECS/Fargate, Azure Container Apps, Google Cloud Run) to reduce operational overhead.

Security is integrated at every stage — DevSecOps, not an afterthought. This includes secrets management through HashiCorp Vault or cloud-native solutions (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault), network policies restricting inter-service communication, TLS termination, and security header enforcement. Access to infrastructure follows the principle of least privilege with audit logging.

Cost optimization is an ongoing practice: right-sizing compute instances based on utilization metrics, implementing auto-scaling policies, leveraging reserved instances or savings plans for predictable workloads, and FinOps tagging to attribute costs to specific projects and teams.