Production hardening
Theworkbetweenademoandadependency
Observability, cost ceilings, load behaviour and failure paths — for teams who have something working and need it to keep working.
This is the least glamorous service we offer and the one that most often decides whether a launch survives its first month. It is also the fastest to show value, because the gaps are usually specific and known.
You might recognise
- It works, but nobody is confident enough to put it in front of customers
- An incident happened and the logs could not explain it
- Load testing has never been done and launch is in three weeks
- One dependency going down takes the whole product with it
How we work through it
- 01
Map the failure surface
Every external call, every timeout, every place a failure can propagate. Usually this session alone surfaces two or three things nobody had considered.
- 02
Instrument before optimising
Traces and structured logs first, so tuning is aimed at the actual bottleneck rather than the suspected one.
- 03
Test the unhappy paths
Load, degradation, partial outages. The behaviour under stress is the product, as far as your customers are concerned.
- 04
Write the runbooks
For the on-call engineer at 3am who did not build any of it.
What you are left holding
Everything ships into your repositories and your cloud. There is no runtime dependency on us after handover — that is the point.
- Tracing and structured logging across the critical paths
- Load test results with the breaking points identified
- Fallback behaviour for every external dependency
- Alerting tuned to be worth waking someone for
- Runbooks and an incident review template
Questions we get
- How long does this take?
- The assessment is one to two weeks. Implementation depends entirely on what it finds, and we scope that with you once the gaps are on the table rather than guessing up front.
- Can you do this without having built the system?
- Yes — most of this work is on systems we did not write. Fresh eyes are part of the value.
Have a problem shaped like this?
Thirty minutes, no deck. Bring the thing that is not working and we will tell you what we would do about it — including when the answer is that you do not need us.
We reply within one business day