The $50K deploy that shouldn't have happened
Imagine this: your team ships an autonomous AI agent to production. It works great in staging. But in production, a retry loop fires endlessly, burning through tokens. By the time someone notices, the bill is $50K and climbing.
No kill switch.
No cost cap.
No rate limit.
That's the problem I built release-gate to solve.
What is release-gate?
It's an open-source tool that sits at one specific point in your CI/CD pipeline — between test and deploy. It reads a release-gate.yaml file in your repo and runs governance checks against it.
The result is binary: PASS or FAIL.
No partial deploys.
No "warnings you can ignore."
What it checks (v0.2.0)
1. INPUT_CONTRACT — Schema Validation
Does your agent validate incoming requests? release-gate checks that your JSON schema is syntactically valid, that sample inputs pass, and that bad inputs fail.
yamlinput_contract:
schema:
type: object
required: [prompt]
properties:
prompt:
type: string
maxLength: 1000
2. FALLBACK_DECLARED — Operational Safeguards
Can you kill this agent in under 5 seconds? Who gets paged? Where's the runbook?
yamlfallback_declared:
kill_switch:
type: feature_flag
name: disable_agent
ownership:
team: platform-eng
oncall: oncall@yourco.com
runbook_url: https://wiki/runbook
3. IDENTITY_BOUNDARY — Access Control
Is auth required? Are there rate limits? Can one customer see another's data?
yamlidentity_boundary:
authentication: required
rate_limit: 100
data_isolation:
- user_owned_only
- no_cross_access
4. ACTION_BUDGET — Cost & Resource Controls
What's the max spend? How many retries? How many concurrent requests?
yamlaction_budget:
max_tokens_per_req: 5000
max_retries: 3
max_daily_cost: 1000
max_concurrent: 10
Why YAML?
Because governance should live in the repo, next to the code, reviewed in PRs, and versioned in git. Not in a dashboard someone forgets to update.
What's on the roadmap?
v0.3 (Q2 2026): Approval workflows, dashboard UI, audit reports, compliance evidence generation
v1.0 (Q4 2026): Runtime policy enforcement, multi-tenant support, enterprise integrations
Links:
- Website: release-gate.com
- GitHub: github.com/VamsiSudhakaran1/release-gate
I'd love your feedback
This is early (v0.2.0) and I'm actively building.
What governance checks would matter most to your team? What's missing? Drop a comment or open an issue on GitHub.
Thanks for taking your time in reading this.
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