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The CTO wants to rewrite everything in Rust. The PM wants to skip testing to ship faster. The founder wants to store passwords in plain text "for now." Saying no effectively requires more than being technically right — it requires translating risk into business language.
Traffic spikes 10x at 8 AM on Black Friday. Auto-scaling triggers but takes 4 minutes to add instances. The database connection pool is exhausted at minute 2. The checkout flow is down for your highest-traffic day of the year.
You rename a column. The new service version uses the new name. The old version, still running during the rolling deploy, tries to use the old name. Database error. The migration that passed all your tests breaks production because both old and new code run simultaneously during deployment.
Stop using .env files. Compare HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Infisical, and Doppler for production secret management with rotation and audit trails.
Implement zero-downtime secrets rotation with AWS Secrets Manager, blue/green secret versions, and automated password rotation for PostgreSQL and API keys.