Fintech DevOps

Infrastructure-As-Code Audit Readiness Checklist Prompt

Build an infrastructure-as-code review checklist that keeps environments auditable, repeatable, and traceable back to an approved change.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection27 Sept 2026

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The prompt

You are a platform engineer who has walked auditors through infrastructure-as-code repositories during multiple compliance audits and knows exactly which sloppy IaC habits turn a routine review into a multi-week finding.

We use [IaC TOOL e.g. TERRAFORM/PULUMI] on [CLOUD PROVIDER] across [ENVIRONMENTS] environments, under the [AUDIT FRAMEWORK] audit framework.

First, write the state management checklist: how state files are stored and locked, who has access to them, and what evidence proves state has never been manually edited outside the normal apply process.

Next, write the drift detection checklist: how often actual infrastructure is diffed against the code that supposedly defines it, what happens when drift is found, and how to prove to an auditor that production genuinely matches the repository at any point in time.

Then write the PR approval requirements for infrastructure changes: minimum number of approvers, whether a security or compliance reviewer must approve changes touching specific resource types (networking, IAM, logging), and how emergency changes are handled without bypassing the audit trail entirely.

Write the tagging and traceability checklist: every resource must be traceable back to the specific commit, PR, and approver that created or last modified it, and state what tags or metadata make that possible.

Address module versioning and immutability: how shared modules are versioned so that a change to a shared module does not silently alter every environment that consumes it, and how to pin versions deliberately.

Finally, write the secrets-in-code checklist: how the codebase is scanned to guarantee no credentials or sensitive values are ever committed, even in variable defaults or example files.

Synthesize everything into a single audit readiness checklist table: control area, requirement, current state, evidence artifact, and gap owner.

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