The Untagged Outage
The day I pushed PLAT-868 to our core infrastructure repository
felt small at the time. It was just another pull request merged,
another ticket closed. Looking back, however, it marked a massive
shift in how we managed our growing fleet of infrastructure components.
We finally started applying clear ownership and criticality labels to
everything we deployed, and the impact has been profound. Before this,
identifying who owned a particular microservice or database, or
understanding its true impact on our platform's overall health, was
often a frantic scramble during an incident. It could also be a
drawn-out debate during quarterly planning.