Pillar 11 · Operate
The Christmas change freeze is easy to declare; the exception almost nobody writes down. Before 24 December 2026, put the break-glass rule on one page — who authorises, what qualifies, and what gets recorded.
A disaster recovery runbook template with the exact restore commands for a real service: RPO/RTO, database and file recovery, DNS, secrets and a smoke test.
You deleted the wrong branch with git branch -D. Here is how to recover it from the reflog, or with git fsck, before garbage collection removes the commits.
Misconfigured Kubernetes probes cause the outages they were meant to prevent. Configure all three deliberately: readiness to gate traffic, liveness to restart the wedged, startup to protect slow boots.
Cyber Monday 2026 is Monday 30 November. A change freeze that is a hard lock removes your ability to fix things when they break. Pave the emergency lane before the window opens.
How Dutch payment and e-money institutions should fold DORA into DNB’s existing supervisory relationship, building the register, incident reporting and resilience controls once rather than twice.
Your webhook fired twice and created two orders from one payment. That is not a bug in the sender. It is at-least-once delivery meeting a non-idempotent handler. Here is the root cause and the fix.
Black Friday falls on 27 November 2026. Reconcile your carriers’ peak cut-off calendars against the delivery dates your checkout promises, add a buffer, and build one kill-switch to widen the window when throughput slips.
Black Friday 2026 is 27 November. Load-test at your real peak and fail your primary payment provider before the day, so capacity, CDN and failover are proven, not hoped for.
US Thanksgiving falls on Thursday 26 November 2026 and your American vendors go dark for four days. Here is the one thing to check before the date.