The Production Mindset
Alice's bakery site is live. Then at 3 a.m., her phone starts buzzing.
After this lesson, you'll be able to identify the failures that matter most to your app and decide how you would detect and respond to them.
Map risks using test accounts, fake data and staging; never run failure drills against real users.
A live app needs more than a working demo. Almost every night emergency is one of six causes. Name them, see how staging (a private test copy of your app) differs from production, and why a small first version is easier to keep alive.
What this lesson covers
- 1Launch gate: what must be true first
A launch gate is a short written list of checks that must pass, with proof, before real users get access.
- 2What wakes you at 3am
Almost every production emergency comes from one of six causes: a bad deploy, a provider outage, a data mistake, a leaked secret or abuse, runaway cost, or something that expired.
- 3Environment parity and drift
Staging is a private copy of the app with its own test data, where changes are tried before real users see them.
- 4Secrets management in production
Managing secrets means more than hiding them.
- 5Scope as a risk budget
Every feature adds code to test, data to protect, a bill to pay and something to fix at night.