Building SwiftDeploy: From Declarative Deployments to Policy-Gated Releases Introduction SwiftDeploy is a DevOps deployment tool I built as part of the HNG DevOps Track. The project started as a deployment automation task and later became a policy-gated and observable deployment system. In Stage 4A, I built the deployment engine. The tool could read a manifest.yaml file, generate infrastructure files, deploy the stack, and switch between stable and canary modes. In Stage 4B, I extended the project with observability, policy enforcement, chaos testing, status checks, and audit reporting. The goal was to build a tool that does not just deploy containers, but also checks whether the environment is safe before deployment and promotion. The Design: A Tool That Writes Its Own Infrastructure The main idea behind SwiftDeploy is that manifest.yaml remains the single source of truth. Instead of manually writing docker-compose.yml and nginx.conf , the CLI reads the manifest and generates those files from templates.…