Rapid, Regular, Stable — and a maintenance exclusion set too late doesn't help
Release channels match upgrade cadence to real risk tolerance; exclusions must be set before a high-risk window, not during one.
Speaker notes
- Rapid gets newest GKE versions shortly after release, appropriate only for a dedicated test cluster, never production. Regular is a balanced, battle-tested cadence — Meridian's own default for staging and prod. Stable is the most conservative, longest-validated option.
- Maintenance windows define WHEN automated upgrades are allowed to happen; maintenance exclusions temporarily block them entirely, for up to 90 days, during a period where any disruption risk is unacceptable.
- State the incident-critical action directly: set an exclusion BEFORE a known high-risk traffic period begins — once GKE has already started a control-plane or node upgrade, an exclusion added after the fact does not retroactively pause work already in progress.
Deck map
01
One pipeline, built deliberately
02
PCDE sections 1-2, and where this course sits in the track
03
ACE operates a resource; PCDE designs the system
04
One tooling project, not one pipeline per environment
05
Dev, staging, and prod should never share one policy
06
What actually crosses the project boundary: a token, never a key
07
A hand-run command leaves no record of why
08
Local Terraform state is a production incident waiting to happen
09
Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST: forked, never left unmodified
10
Terraform for foundations, Config Connector for workload-coupled infra
11
Git decides, automation reconciles — no human runs apply
12
Cloud Build's whole job: source in, tested artifact out
13
Built-in substitutions are automatic; user-defined ones need an underscore
14
An unfiltered branch trigger is a budget incident waiting to happen
15
Three repository modes, and scanning stops at the virtual layer
16
Cheap checks first, expensive checks last
17
Cloud Build produces; Cloud Deploy promotes — never the reverse
18
Four objects: DeliveryPipeline, Target, Release, Rollout
19
Canary limits exposure; blue/green makes the cutover atomic
20
A human gates production; automation gates everything else
21
Meridian's full path: merge to production, one continuous record
22
Credentials go in Secret Manager; configuration goes in Parameter Manager
23
An ENV baked into a Dockerfile is still build-time injection
24
One question resolves almost every config-placement decision
25
Ephemeral environments need a TTL, or they're not actually ephemeral
26
Rapid, Regular, Stable — and a maintenance exclusion set too late doesn't help
27
A compromised pipeline is every environment it deploys to
28
SLSA grades the pipeline's trustworthiness, not any single artifact
29
Default-deny, or an unlisted cluster accepts anything
30
Only /home survives a session — everything else is rebuilt fresh
31
Every chapter of this course, in one sequence
32
Readiness checklist