Backend Deployment cookbook

You've been running your API on your own machine this whole roadmap, and you have no idea how to actually put it on the internet.

Your Dockerfile works, so you never went back to check what's actually running inside that image.

Your platform keeps routing traffic to a pod that's still crashing, because as far as it can tell, everything is fine.

Every deploy, a handful of users get a connection reset in the middle of a request, and it always clears up right after.

Something you shipped an hour ago is now failing for real users, and your only plan is to start a whole new deploy to undo it.

You need a new required column, but the old version of your app is still serving traffic while the new one rolls out.

You've never rolled back a real deploy. You assume the button works.

Your last full rollout took the whole API down at once, and everyone found out from the pager, not from a dashboard.

It worked in staging yesterday. Today the same code, rebuilt for prod, does something different.

Nobody scans your images before they go out, and you genuinely don't know what's inside the base image you started from.