Series: Firstly,, I built the engine (manifest → rendered nginx + compose, gated lifecycle). Then I added the eyes (Prometheus /metrics ) and the brain (OPA policy sidecar). This post covers the complete journey.

Table of Contents

What problem are we solving?

The single source of truth

Architecture overview

The engine: writing its own infrastructure

The eyes: Prometheus instrumentation

The brain: OPA policy sidecar

Gated lifecycle: deploy and promote

The live dashboard: swiftdeploy status

The memory: swiftdeploy audit

Injecting chaos and watching the gates fire

Lessons learned

1.…