This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ogonna Nnamani
The Beauty of Failure
Disclaimer: The failure lasted no more than 4 minutes, and I quickly reverted to a previous stable version. But here's the thing — I tweeted about it.
That simple tweet made me realize some things that I wasn't quite prepared for. In the comment section, I encountered four distinct types of people:
- Those who found it hilarious — Fellow engineers sharing their own war stories.
- Those who didn't believe me.
- Those who immediately started suggesting fixes — Those who couldn't help but jump into troubleshooting mode.
- Those who thought it meant I was just incompetent.
But here's what that interaction taught me: there's raw beauty in admitting that you can fail and that it's absolutely okay to fail.
What Failure Really Makes You
Failure doesn't make you incompetent—it makes you experienced. Each mistake adds a line of rank to your experience bar, a badge that says "I've been there, I've survived it, and I know how to handle it next time." More importantly, it removes the burden of claiming to know everything.
Spoiler alert: you never will, and that's perfectly fine.
Let me share some of my greatest hits in the failure department.
The Great Email Blackout of Monday Morning
When you forget to migrate nameservers and an entire company loses email access
Picture this: I'm performing an AWS cross-account migration for a major Oil & Gas company. Everything is going smoothly until the DNS migration phase. In my meticulous planning, I managed to overlook one tiny detail — migrating the nameservers.
Monday morning arrives, and suddenly an entire company wakes up to find themselves locked out of their emails. For over five hours. On a Monday. In the oil and gas industry.
The phone calls were… let's just say they were intense. But that failure taught me more about DNS propagation, backup communication channels, and the critical importance of testing every single component of a migration than any certification course ever could. Sometimes the most expensive lessons are the most valuable ones.
The Database Credential Catastrophe
The horror of realizing your production app is talking to staging database
Then there was the time I pushed what I thought was a simple fix. An old branch from my git repository deployed to production and decided to pick up the staging database credentials, completely replacing the production database credentials.
Our production application was suddenly trying to connect to our staging database. The irony wasn't lost on me — I had created the perfect test of our monitoring systems, just not intentionally.
That incident changed how I approached environment isolation. Now I have strict compliance checks before any PR is merged, proper credential management, and multiple validation layers. That "simple fix" became the catalyst for implementing some of our most robust security practices.
The Kubernetes Scheduling Nightmare
More recently, I pushed a fix and mistakenly changed the annotations of our self-hosted GitHub runners. Suddenly, our pods couldn't schedule on our node pools because they had a nodeSelector rule that no longer matched.
Our entire CI/CD pipeline ground to a halt. Developers couldn't deploy. The build queue started backing up like traffic on a Friday afternoon.
Each of these failures taught me something invaluable that I couldn't have learned any other way. The list is endless, honestly.
The Road to Antifragility
The road to antifragility is a continuous process. What happens after you break production is remarkably similar to a murder case investigation — this is why you need to build systems that anticipate these trying times. You need evidence, you need witnesses, you need to reconstruct the timeline, and you need to understand what went wrong.
Your Detective Toolkit
The essential tools for investigating production failures
Granular logs become your crime scene evidence. They tell you exactly what happened, when it happened, and in what sequence. Without them, you're investigating a case blindfolded. I can't stress this enough — log everything that matters.
Comprehensive metrics are your witnesses. They saw everything unfold in real-time and can testify to the state of your system at any given moment. Tools like CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana have become my best friends.
A similar test environment is your crime lab. It's where you can safely recreate the incident, test your theories, and validate your fixes without risking further damage to production.
Clear post-mortems are your case files. They document not just what went wrong, but why it went wrong, what you learned, and how you're preventing it from happening again. Write them like your future self will thank you for it.
These are your detective tools when all hell breaks loose. And trust me, hell will break loose — it's not a matter of if, but when.
Every Failure is a Lesson
Every failure is a lesson. Some lessons are more expensive than others, but the process invariably makes us better engineers. The engineer who has never broken production is either lying, hasn't been doing this long enough, or isn't pushing boundaries hard enough to drive real innovation.
The most senior engineers I know aren't the ones who never make mistakes — they're the ones who've made the most mistakes, learned from them, and built systems resilient enough to handle future failures gracefully.
Embracing the Inevitable
So here's to failure. Here's to the 3 AM phone calls, the sweaty palms during incident response, and the wisdom we gain from each crash.
Because at the end of the day, our failures don't define our incompetence — they define our experience.
Once again, my name is Ogonna, I am a DevOps Engineer, and I broke production today.
What did you do today?
If you enjoyed this story of production failures and lessons learned, follow me for more DevOps insights and real-world experiences. Also connect with me on LinkedIn for more behind-the-scenes DevOps stories.
Have your own production failure story? Share it in the comments — let's normalize talking about our failures and learning from each other!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ogonna Nnamani
Ogonna Nnamani | Sciencx (2025-07-23T15:27:43+00:00) Hello, I am a DevOps Engineer and I Broke Production Today. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/07/23/hello-i-am-a-devops-engineer-and-i-broke-production-today/
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