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The startup was running fine at $3,000/month AWS. Then a feature launched, traffic grew, and the bill hit $47,000 before anyone noticed. No alerts. No budgets. No tagging. Just a credit card statement and a very uncomfortable board meeting.

Master CockroachDB multi-region deployments: table localities, follower reads, transaction retries, zone configs, and survivability goals.

"It works on staging" is one of the most dangerous phrases in software. The timeout is 5 seconds in dev, 30 seconds in prod. The cache TTL is different. The database pool size is different. The feature flag is on in staging but off in prod. Config drift makes every deployment a gamble.

Harden container images with multi-stage builds, distroless images, non-root users, vulnerability scanning (Trivy), SBOM generation (Syft), image signing (Cosign), and admission controllers to block unsigned images.

Build secure containers with non-root users, distroless base images, multi-stage builds, and runtime security. Learn seccomp profiles, image scanning, SBOM generation.