The previous article in this series covered feature flags: how to decouple deploying code from releasing it, so a bad idea can be turned off without a rollback. That only pays off if deploying itself is a boring, repeatable event rather than a stressful one. This article is about making it boring.
This is part of the Full Stack SaaS Masterclass, and it sits at a point where the temptation to overbuild is strongest. Deployment invites that kind of overreach. Engineers reach for Kubernetes and blue-green everything before they have the traffic or the team that justifies any of it. I want to walk through the choices in the order I'd actually make them, honest about which ones are earned early and which aren't.
None of what follows assumes a platform team. It assumes a small team shipping a real product, choosing infrastructure that won't fight them at 2am.
Picking a deployment target without overbuilding
There are roughly three tiers of deployment target, and the right one depends on where you actually are, not where you expect to be in two years.
