A practical comparison of GitLab CI, GitHub Actions and Jenkins that skips the feature table. What actually decides the choice is where your code lives, whether the runner can reach the deploy target, and who owns the control plane at 2am. Includes the cost mechanics, the security failure modes, and a decision procedure you can run in an afternoon.
Readiness probes are necessary for Kubernetes zero-downtime rollouts, but they only close one of four gaps. Here is what actually drops requests during a deploy: the race between SIGTERM and endpoint propagation, probes that lie, surge settings that quietly delete capacity, and load balancers that never watched EndpointSlices in the first place.
Both platforms look identical on day one: a schema file, a typed client, a deploy that works. The difference shows up months later, in the queries you cannot afford and the layer you cannot leave. A practical comparison of data models, billing shape, auth stickiness and exit cost.
Running Docker Compose in production is a reasonable choice for a single host, but the defaults were chosen for a laptop. A walk through the failure families that actually bite: the deploy gap, unrotated logs filling the disk, anonymous volumes, published ports that bypass your firewall, secrets in environment variables, and health checks that report without acting.
Three hours into an ingress controller upgrade for an application that is one Go binary and a Postgres database. Nothing is broken. The cluster has just become the thing you operate. An honest look at what Kubernetes costs, when it earns that cost, and what to run instead.
A plugin quietly reverts after every deploy and nobody knows why. That is what happens when Git and wp-admin both think they own the file tree. Here is how to build a deployment workflow where the repo is the source of truth and the database only ever travels one way.
A deploy key in GitHub secrets is a shell on your production server, handed to a container you don't control, running code from maintainers you've never met. Here's how to build the pipeline so a leaked key isn't worth much: forced commands, scoped sudo, pinned actions and a real approval gate.