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Open KB Starter Map for Engineering Teams

Curated, high-signal public resources you can lean on for delivery, release, reliability, security, and process. Use this as a jump-off index; each item is well-maintained and widely referenced.

Core delivery & release​

  • Trunk-based development — trunkbaseddevelopment.com
    When: Branching/release patterns, short-lived branches, fast flow.
  • Versioning & change semantics — semver.org; keepachangelog.com; conventionalcommits.org
    When: Consistent versioning, changelog structure, commit semantics.
  • GitOps & cloud-native delivery — CNCF TAG App Delivery; ArgoCD/Flux docs
    When: Declarative delivery, progressive rollout, ops-as-code in cloud-native.

Engineering handbooks​

  • GitLab Handbook (engineering/product/devops)
    When: Opinionated playbooks for release, deploy, incidents, observability, product.
  • Microsoft Engineering Fundamentals / Playbook (GitHub)
    When: Practical checklists for design, testing, CI/CD, reliability.
  • Google Engineering Practices / Testing docs
    When: Code review guidance, testing philosophy, lightweight process patterns.

Reliability, incidents, and postmortems​

  • Google SRE books (public PDFs)
    When: SLOs/SLIs, incident response, error budgets, reliability culture.
  • awesome-sre (GitHub)
    When: Curated SRE resources and tooling references.
  • awesome-postmortems (GitHub)
    When: Real-world RCA/postmortem examples to model your own practice.

Security & supply chain​

  • OpenSSF Best Practices
    When: Baseline secure software practices and checklists.
  • SLSA.dev
    When: Supply-chain levels, build/release integrity controls (provenance, isolation).

Architecture & patterns​

  • ThoughtWorks Tech Radar
    When: Staying current on tools/techniques; adopt/assess/hold language.
  • CNCF whitepapers (TAG App Delivery, SIG Security)
    When: Modern cloud-native delivery and security patterns.

How to use this map​

  1. Pick the relevant slice for your need (release, reliability, security, etc.).
  2. Apply the smallest coherent pattern (e.g., trunk-based + conventional commits + semver).
  3. For incidents/postmortems, model from awesome-postmortems + SRE books.
  4. For supply chain, start with OpenSSF basics, then layer SLSA where needed.
  5. Revisit the Tech Radar quarterly to avoid tech drift and adjust bets.