Why it matters

Bad incident response costs money, users, and team morale. Learning good technique protects all three.

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The architecture

Assess: how bad? What users affected? What's the blast radius?

Mitigate: fastest way to reduce user impact. Rollback, feature flag, traffic shift.

Communicate: keep stakeholders informed.

Incident responseAssessscope + severityMitigatestop bleedingCommunicatekeep informedRoot cause fix comes after mitigation; users don't wait for RCA
Incident phases.
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How it works end to end

Incident commander: single person coordinating response. Not the debugger.

Roles: IC (commander), tech lead (debugging), comms lead (stakeholder updates). Separate.

Rollback first: if recent change caused issue, revert. Fix forward after.

Runbooks: pre-written procedures for known scenarios. Reduce panic decisions.