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God, this is good advice. Living this hell at the moment. Just a complete "throw every feature at the wall" environment where nothing is documented and it's an infinitely expanding Kessler Syndrome-like failure of "automation".

Backpressure is required in order for a distributed system to continue to run successfully. Half the time the people who think they need a new feature just want to be unique.

The critical observation is that these people won't always be around or have this deployment plan fresh in their minds. You need most of your deployments to follow the same kinds of rules, so that when you look at a misbehaving service that you haven't had to deal with in ages, you can figure out what's going on and why it's wedged. Every new thing it can do is tribal knowledge that's not captured anywhere. It might have already walked out the door in fact.

I think the assumption is that the developers already manage deploying as well, but it's manual.