⚡Day 1 — The Deployment That Looked Perfect... Until Users Said It’s Broken

🎯 Why This Episode Matters

Most DevOps content shows happy paths:
Deploy → Green → Done.

But in real companies, some of the most damaging failures happen when:

• CI/CD is green

• Health checks are passing

• Metrics look stable

…and yet users are still saying:

On paper, everything looks healthy.
But the behavior is wrong.

Day 1 is about that exact nightmare:

👉 A deployment that looks perfect from the pipeline’s point of view,
but clearly wrong from the user’s point of view.

We don’t fix it with theory.
We walk through how a real engineer thinks when everything is “fine”… except production.

📌 What We Explore in Day 1

In this challenge episode, we work with a simple, realistic scenario instead of a huge, complex setup:

• A web application that was supposed to ship a new version

• A CI/CD pipeline that reports full success

• Health checks that all pass

• Dashboards that show no obvious spikes or crashes

• Users reporting that the UI or behavior is not what was expected

In the video, we:

• Walk through the state of the system after a “successful” deployment

• Look at minimal terminal output and status that all say ✅ OK

• Use the whiteboard to show where reality can drift away from expectations

• Talk about why a green deployment does not always equal a correct deployment

You don’t need to copy commands.
You need to absorb the way of thinking.

🚨 Live Incident: Everything Green, Still Wrong

We begin exactly where many engineers get stuck in real life:

• Deployment applied

• CI/CD finished with ✅ SUCCESS

• kubectl get pods (or your equivalent) looks normal

• CPU, memory, and basic metrics are fine

On the surface, nothing is “broken”.

But the user experience tells a different story:

• Old UI still appearing

• New feature not visible

• Inconsistent behavior across users or sessions

This is that uncomfortable moment where someone says,

In the episode, we:

• Show how this situation feels from a DevOps engineer’s point of view

• Highlight the gap between what the team expected and what is actually running

• Frame this as a mismatch problem, not just a “bug”

Instead of handing you a single root cause,
we focus on building your incident intuition.

🧭 The Investigation Mindset We Practice

This challenge is not about memorizing commands.
It’s about training your brain to ask the right questions.

In Day 1, we talk through a simple but powerful mental model:

1️⃣ Separate “Healthy” from “Correct”

A service can be:

• Healthy: not crashing, no errors

• But not Correct: wrong version, wrong behavior

On the whiteboard, we explore this difference and why it matters so much in production.

2️⃣ Expectation vs Reality

We ask:

• What did we expect to be running after this deployment?

• What are we actually seeing?

That gap is where the incident lives.

3️⃣ Zooming Out Before Zooming In

Instead of instantly jumping to:

• “It’s DNS”

• “It’s cache”

• “It’s Kubernetes”

…we first step back and look at:

• Where in the flow things might have diverged

• Which parts of the system could have changed behavior

• Why everything “green” doesn’t guarantee correctness

4️⃣ Multiple Valid Hypotheses

We deliberately do not give you a single, “correct” answer.
Instead, we treat this like a real war-room:

There might be:

• Version mismatches

• Wrong configurations

• Caching behavior

• Old artifacts being reused

• Routing pointing to unexpected targets

And your job is to decide:
👉 “Where would I look first?”

That mindset is what grows you as a DevOps engineer.

🎯 The Day 1 Challenge

At the end of the episode, you get a challenge instead of a fixed solution:

Question:
What is the first thing YOU would investigate?

There is no single correct answer here.
There are many valid approaches.

Your comment is not about “guessing the magic word”.
It’s about how you think as an engineer.

Completing Day 1 by commenting your thought process:

• Keeps your streak alive in the 30-Day DevOps Challenge

• Moves you one step closer to receiving the DevOps Simulation Ebook at the end

• Trains you to react like a real DevOps / SRE when things “look fine but feel wrong”

🧠 What Day 1 Teaches You

By the end of Episode 1, you’ll understand:

• Why a green deployment doesn’t always mean success

• How to think in terms of behavior, not just status

• The gap between “tooling says okay” and “users say no”

• How to approach incidents where there is no obvious error

• Why good DevOps is more about mindset and investigation than about tools

If you want to become the engineer who doesn’t panic
when things “look healthy but act wrong”,
Day 1 is your starting point.

🚀 Coming Up in Day 2

Day 2 goes even deeper into painful reality:

👉 Production breaks… without any deployment.

No new code.
No new image.
No pipeline run.
Yet users are impacted.

We’ll explore the world of non-deployment changes —
the kind of failures that come from “something changed somewhere”
without anyone shipping new code.

Again:
No fluffy theory.
Just realistic failure scenarios and the mindset to survive them.

If you want Day 2 as soon as it drops,
make sure you’re subscribed on both YouTube and the newsletter 👇

🔗 Watch Day 1 & Join the Challenge

🎥 Watch DevOps 30-Day Challenge — Day 1
Search for:

or visit my channel directly:
YouTube: https://youtu.be/kWhK9YKvfBs

📬 Get future episodes + challenge reminders + extras
Subscribe to the newsletter:
👉 https://learnwithdevopsengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Newsletter subscribers get:

• Episode breakdowns in written form (like this)

• Checklists you can reuse for real incidents

• Future simulation bundles and labs

• Interview-style questions based on each day of the challenge

💼 Need Help with Real DevOps Setup or Incident Simulation?

If you’re building:

• Real-world CI/CD pipelines

• DevOps home labs or training environments

• Internal incident simulations for your engineering team

• Kubernetes / Docker-based setups for education or business

You can work with me directly.
Reply to this email or message me on YouTube / Instagram.

— Arbaz
📺 YouTube: Learn with DevOps Engineer
📬 Newsletter: learnwithdevopsengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe
📸 Instagram: instagram.com/learnwithdevopsengineer