What is "Shift Left" in DevOps, and why does it matter?
Shift Left means moving activities like testing, security, and reliability checks earlier (to the left) in the software development lifecycle, instead of treating them as last-minute steps before release.
Examples:
SAST / linting in the IDE or pre-commit hook.
SCA (dependency scanning) in PR pipelines.
IaC scanning (Checkov, tfsec) on Terraform PRs.
Container image scanning in CI before pushing to registry.
Performance / load tests in pre-prod, not after launch.
Why it matters: bugs caught at the IDE cost ~10× less than in QA, and ~100× less than in production. Shift Left compresses feedback loops.
Shift Left = pull testing, security, and reliability concerns to the left of the SDLC timeline (closer to dev). Mention concrete shifts: SAST in PR, IaC scanning in CI, chaos testing in staging.
That shows you've actually done it.