Article · 12 min read

I Test in Production

Charity Majors · Honeycomb Blog Free Intermediate

Majors argues that instead of piling on pre deploy gates, you invest in fast deploys, good observability, and quick rollback so problems are caught and fixed in minutes. For a tiny team this is freeing: you do not need a giant staging apparatus if you can see and undo a bad change quickly. It reframes safety as recovery speed rather than ceremony.

  • Shipping fast plus fast rollback beats slow, heavily gated releases
  • You cannot fully replicate production, so watch production closely
  • Aim for a short time from merge to deploy, ideally minutes
Open on honeycomb.io ↗

The question it answers

  1. How should our shipping process change once we hire our first engineer and it is no longer just me pushing to production?

Read with it

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