Nothing exists in production without being declared in code

Most of the infrastructure problems I get called about are not really infrastructure problems. They are memory problems. Somebody made a change by hand eighteen months ago, it worked, and nobody wrote it down.

The fix is not a tool. It is a rule: if it is not in the repository, it does not exist in production. Everything else — Terraform, GitOps, the review process — is just how you keep that rule honest.

This is a sample post so the blog plumbing is wired and working. Delete it when you publish something real.