Policies

Overview

Environment Policies in Bluebricks provide a centralized way to define, enforce, and automate rules that govern how deployments operate across your environments. These policies allow platform and DevOps teams to create guardrails that ensure consistency, compliance, and security—without restricting developer velocity. By applying policies directly at the environment level, Bluebricks ensures that every deployment—regardless of artifact type or triggering interface—follows a predictable, controlled, and auditable workflow.

Types of Environment Policies

Bluebricks supports several built-in policies that address common governance, security, and cost-control needs. These policies can be combined to create tailored guardrails per environment.

Owner Approval

The Owner Approval policy ensures that deployments to sensitive environments—such as staging or production—cannot proceed without explicit approval from designated environment owners. This helps organizations enforce:

• Controlled access to mission-critical environments

• Review workflows for changes with high impact

• Separation of duties between developers and environment custodians

When triggered, the run pauses until an approved owner confirms the change.

Cost Limit

The Cost Limit policy helps prevent unexpected or runaway infrastructure changes by enforcing a maximum allowed cost threshold for all deployments in the environment. Bluebricks evaluates the projected cost impact of a IaC change, and:

• Blocks changes that exceed defined cost boundaries

• Allows exceeding cost limit only with owner approval, allowing better control over spend

• Ensures budget control and predictable spending across environments

This allows for managing cloud spend at a much granular scope and create smaller cost centers.

Allowed Blueprints

The Allowed Blueprints policy restricts which blueprints can be deployed to a given environment. This allows platform teams to tightly control the types of workloads permitted to run, in edition to who can run them. Use this policy to:

• Ensure only vetted or approved blueprints reach production

• Prevent experimental, untested, or internal-only blueprints from being deployed to critical environments

• Enforce architectural standards defined by the platform team

• Ensure team members only have access to deploy certain blueprints.

This eliminates misconfigurations and ensures consistent use of validated patterns. Moreover, users can only see Blueprints and versions based on their environment membership.

Key Capabilities

Bluebricks enhances Environment Policies with features designed for safety, transparency, and scale:

• Fine-grained policy definitions, scoped per environment (Dev, QA, Staging, Production)

• Unified enforcement across Terraform/OpenTofu, Bicep, CloudFormation, Helm, and Generic artifacts

• Automatic policy validation before a run executes

• Clear, actionable violation messages, shown directly in the run details

• RBAC-aligned governance, ensuring policies reflect your organization’s access model

Example Use Cases

Environment Policies are valuable when you need to:

• Prevent accidental production changes without review

• Enforce budget controls for expensive infrastructure

• Restrict access to certain deployment patterns or blueprints

Operational Workflow

Whenever a run is triggered Bluebricks automatically evaluates all relevant environment policies before execution begins. If a policy is violated:

1. The run is immediately paused or blocked

2. A clear explanation is shown, detailing which rule failed and why

3. The user can update inputs, request approval, or revise the policy before retrying

This ensures that every environment stays compliant and protected by default.