AI prompts for DevOps that generate automation you can run in production
In DevOps the cost of a vague prompt isn't a bad paragraph — it's a deprecated API, a non-idempotent script, or an unbounded blast radius. The prompts that hold up in production pin exact versions, demand idempotency, and ask the model to call out destructive operations before you run them. These templates are written that way: specific stacks, explicit constraints, and safety checks baked in, so AI accelerates your toil work instead of adding to it.
Last updated · By the Prompt Orange team
Top prompts for devops engineers
1. Write production-grade Terraform
“Write Terraform for a web app”
Too vague—AI has to guess what you want
“Write Terraform (v1.7, AWS provider v5) to provision a production web app: a VPC with public/private subnets across two AZs, an ALB, an ECS Fargate service (2 tasks min, autoscaling on CPU), and an RDS Postgres instance in the private subnet with encryption at rest. Use variables for region, instance sizes, and tags. Add comments explaining each resource, and list any values I must set before apply. Do not hardcode secrets — reference variables or SSM.”
Specific, clear, ready to use
2. Debug a failing CI/CD pipeline
“Why is my pipeline failing?”
Too vague—AI has to guess what you want
“My GitHub Actions workflow fails intermittently at the Docker build step with 'no space left on device' on the standard ubuntu-latest runner. Give me the likely causes in priority order, the diagnostic command for each, and the smallest fix for each (cleanup step, smaller layers, build cache, or self-hosted runner). Recommend the one you'd try first and why. Keep it to changes I can make in the workflow file.”
Specific, clear, ready to use
3. Write an idempotent automation script
“Write a bash script to set up a server”
Too vague—AI has to guess what you want
“Write a bash script to bootstrap a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 server: install Docker and the compose plugin, create a non-root deploy user with sudo, harden SSH (disable root login and password auth), and enable a UFW firewall allowing only 22/80/443. Make it idempotent and safe to run multiple times — check before creating, set `set -euo pipefail`, and echo a clear message for each step. Comment any line that performs a destructive or irreversible change.”
Specific, clear, ready to use
4. Review a Kubernetes manifest
“Check my k8s yaml”
Too vague—AI has to guess what you want
“Review this Kubernetes Deployment and Service manifest (cluster v1.29) for production-readiness. Check specifically for: missing resource requests/limits, no liveness/readiness probes, running as root, no securityContext, latest image tags, and a single replica. For each gap, show the exact YAML to add and a one-line reason. Rank the findings by risk. Don't rewrite the whole file — give me a diff-style set of additions.”
Specific, clear, ready to use
5. Write an incident runbook
“Write a runbook for an outage”
Too vague—AI has to guess what you want
“Write an on-call runbook for 'API p99 latency > 2s' on a Node.js service behind an ALB, backed by Postgres and Redis. Structure: how to confirm the alert is real, a triage checklist in priority order (recent deploy, DB connection pool, slow queries, Redis evictions, upstream dependency), the exact command/dashboard for each check, mitigation options with their tradeoffs, and rollback steps. Write it so a new on-call engineer at 3am can follow it without prior context.”
Specific, clear, ready to use