GISI ADO Level case studies
GISI ADO Level · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The GISI ADO Level (also written ADO Level or GIAC ADO) is a DevOps-focused certification aimed at practitioners who build, ship, and operate software rather than at pure managers. It suits developers, build and release engineers, site reliability engineers, system administrators, and security staff who are moving into pipeline and platform work. The GISI ADO Level case studies are 5 cases and about 5,371 words.
1The Hotfix That Vanished Between Releases
Northwind Analytics runs a B2B SaaS product with 16 engineers, one repository, and continuous deployment of main to its cloud tier. On-premises customers, however, receive a monthly frozen build cut from a release/YYYY.MM branch that is cherry-picked from main by the release manager.
966 words, about 5 min2A 47-Minute Pipeline Nobody Trusts
Meridian Health's platform team maintains a TypeScript monorepo of nine packages and 1,850 tests on GitHub Actions. The pipeline's median duration is 41 minutes and its p95 is 47 minutes.
1,133 words, about 6 min3Canary at 5% and the Error Budget Is Already Gone
Halden Pay runs a payments API on Kubernetes: 40 pods, about 200 requests per second at peak, deployed with Argo Rollouts. The canary steps through 5% → 25% → 50% → 100% with ten-minute pauses.
1,046 words, about 5 min4terraform plan Wants to Delete the Production Database
Corvus Logistics runs a three-account AWS estate (dev, staging, prod) from one Terraform repository. State lives in S3 with DynamoDB locking, one workspace per environment, and environment differences are meant to live in .tfvars files.
1,069 words, about 5 min5420 Alerts a Week and Nobody Looked
Tarn Basin Energy has 60 microservices on Prometheus, Alertmanager and PagerDuty, with five engineers sharing the on-call rotation. Last week produced 420 alerts; 89% resolved before anyone acknowledged them, and the team was paged 12 times at night.
1,157 words, about 6 min