At AllCode, we’ve learned a few lessons after running production environments for 10 years.

1. 1. Never roll out to production on Friday - When you’re rolling out on Friday, the rollout will always get delayed to Friday afternoon. Something will go wrong. No one wants to work over the weekend due to a decision made to roll out on Friday.
   2. Never run a database on a virtual machine when an automated database solution is available. If you run a database on a virtual machine, you won’t make the IOPS better than on the managed database. You won’t implement a proper backup strategy. When given the option, always run the database on RDS instead of EC2.
   3. When rolling out to production, always make sure that you take a backup of the production database instance before performing the rollout. We’ve seen several rollouts go awry because the database migrations fail, and the migration rollback has never been tested.
   4. When rolling out to production, always make sure that you have another instance running to point to if something goes wrong. It doesn’t even have to be a production version.
   5. Adopt Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery - Sometimes your clients may not want to pay for it. Do it anyway to maintain your sanity.
   6. Automate Everything - From testing to deployment to rollback.