Think Through Production Operations

Overview

Production guidance for running systems. Each reference paper captures what separates operable systems from hopeful ones: logs without correlation IDs, metrics with unbounded cardinality, health checks that pass while the system is down, audit trails that can be edited, and backups that have never been restored.

Core principle: An operational claim is only as real as its evidence. If a journey cannot be observed, an alert has no owner, or a restore has never been rehearsed, the system does not actually have that capability.

Domain Law

NO PRODUCTION-OPERATIONS CHANGE WITHOUT:
1. the minimum required primary paper(s) for the practice selected from the context table;
2. the user journey or failure the signal protects named first;
3. "Existing-codebase checks" run when changing existing telemetry;
4. every applicable MUST mapped to an enforcement point (emitter, alert,
   runbook, drill) and evidence — never silently downgraded.