Hi everyone, So you have been tinkering on a new project for a while, the demos look great, and now it is time to ship to real customers. It is an exciting moment, but also one where small oversights can turn into expensive incidents at 2 AM. This two-part series covers the practical checklist I wish every team went through before flipping the switch to production. Most recommendations are cloud-agnostic, although a few are AWS-specific. The underlying principles apply equally to GCP, Azure, or any other cloud provider. In this first part we focus on the infrastructure foundations : environments, networking, compute, configuration, and deployment strategy. The second part will cover security, monitoring, logging, and operational work. Let's get started. 1. Always Maintain a Production-Like Non-Production Environment This sounds obvious, but it is one of the most commonly skipped fundamentals.…