A 1-minute read: How I kept the servers up and running at any point in time for more than half a year at Wash Out (Telepass Group)?

I would like to share 3 tactics that I have followed to keep the back-end system of Wash Out (Telepass Group), the current company I work at, fully operational for more than half a year.

A quick introduction about Wash Out.

Wash Out is a company of the Telepass Group, leader of mobile Car Washing in Italy.

Returning to our topic, on the first days of May 2021, after working at the company since October 2020, I had another big responsibility. I was responsible for all back-end infrastructure, releases, rollbacks, bug fixes, new features, and all that concerns the company's back-end system.

Getting back to the point, these are 3 key points that I do daily:

1. Monitoring and analysis are vital

I continually monitor the reports of the overall health of systems. At the same time, I continue to ensure availability as conditions change and the system evolves.

2. Treating every change in production as an experiment

Basically, I assume I am wrong. Since failure is always an option, I make 100% sure about the commands I execute, configurations I change, etc.

3. Trusting my engineering intuition and instincts

I have started to take my intuitions seriously, though I usually practice them in a low-risk situation. So my plan is to master it more, then give accurate results quicker. Anyway, the sure thing is that the more engineering experience you gather, the more accurate your intuitions will become.

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.
— Dr. Pamela Zave, coauthor of Software Requirements and Design