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Standard operating procedure
A standard operating procedure template: purpose, when to use it, prerequisites, checked steps, an escalation path, and an owner to review it.
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# SOP: Rotating the production database credentials
**Owner:** Infra team (Sam) · **Review by:** 2027-03-01
## Purpose
Keep production database credentials current with our 90-day rotation policy without causing downtime.
## When to use this
Every 90 days on the security calendar, or immediately if a credential may have leaked (see the incident-response SOP for that trigger).
## Prerequisites
Admin access to the secrets manager, a maintenance window announced at least 24 hours in advance, and the on-call engineer available for the rotation window.
## Steps
1. Announce the maintenance window in #eng-announcements. Check: on-call has reacted to confirm.
2. Generate a new credential in the secrets manager. Check: new credential shows "active" status.
3. Deploy the credential to staging first. Check: staging health check passes for 10 minutes.
4. Deploy to production. Check: error rate stays flat for 15 minutes post-deploy.
5. Revoke the old credential. Check: the revoked credential no longer authenticates.
## If something goes wrong
If the error rate rises after step 4, immediately roll back to the previous credential (still valid until step 5) and page the on-call lead. Do not proceed to revocation until the cause is understood.
How to use it well
- →Every step needs a check, not just an action - "deploy to production" tells someone what to do, "error rate stays flat for 15 minutes" tells them whether it worked.
- →Write the escalation path for the failure you're actually worried about, at the step where it's most likely to happen - a generic "contact your manager" line gets skipped under pressure.
- →An SOP with no review date rots quietly: the dashboard gets renamed, the tool gets replaced, and nobody notices until someone follows stale steps during an actual emergency.