No, you can't. No matter how good you are, you can always "rm -rf" your world.
Yes, we can make it harder, but, at the end of the day, some human, somewhere, has to pull the switch on the stuff that pushes to prod.
You can clobber prod manually, or you accidentally write an erroneous script that clobbers prod. Either way--prod is toast.
The word of the day is "backups".
Yes, backups are vitally important, but no it is not possible to accidentally rm -rf with proper design.
It's possible to have the most dangerous credentials possible and still make it difficult to do catastrophic global changes. Hell it's my job to make sure this is the case.
Can you say more about this?
I understand rm -rf, but not sure how I could design that to be impossible for the most dangerous credentials.
The most dangerous credentials are cosmic rays and we use the Earth’s atmosphere and ECC to fight that.
I didn't even mean you can only make it difficult, I meant you can make it almost impossible to harm a real production environment in such a nuclear way without herculean effort and quite frankly likely collusion from multiple parties.