[presentation]

I invested a few days at the start of building my B2B SaaS company wherein on every deploy we automate branching our actual staging/production databases with Neon, spinning up a complete preview environment with all the real dependencies, applying all migrations to the real data, and running end to end tests on that environment. Once it was set up I almost never need to touch it (and it's documented, but my engineers also don't need to touch it either).

In a few years of that setup being in place, while it's only partially attributable to this CI/CD process, we have never had a single incident—a stark contrast to the volatile on-call experiences I've had at past startups. For me, never being woken up in the night or needing to stress out while reverting deploys that broke our users needs was well worth it.