Until fairly recently, software releases happened once or twice a year, maybe once a quarter. This gave IT teams plenty of time to verify and manually sign off on every change before they were released in big batches during a bank holiday weekend or off-peak hours. Typically, they’d produce paperwork to show that all changes had been properly tested, and then those changes would be approved for release in a change advisory board meeting (CAB).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you just pushed and deployed your latest change to production, and it’s rolling out to your Kubernetes cluster. You sip your coffee as you wrap up some documentation when a ping in the ops channel catches your eye—a sales engineer is complaining that the demo environment is slow. Probably nothing to worry about, not like your changes had anything to do with that… but, minutes later, more alerts start to fire off.