It was working in staging but…

For the first episode of LIVE In Prod, we sit down with Ruel Nopal to talk about one of the most familiar challenges in engineering: when something works perfectly in staging, but behaves very differently when it matters most.

We discuss the gap between environments, the challenges teams face when moving toward production, and why being proactive instead of reactive can make a difference.

A candid conversation about cloud, DevOps, engineering practices, and the lessons that often come from things not going as planned.

🎙️ Guest: Ruel Nopal
🎧 Podcast: LIVE In Prod by CDOps Tech

Timestamps

00:00 - Introducing Live in Prod and the episode’s focus
01:24 - What Ruel is building as a DevOps lead and AI product creator
02:51 - What “it worked in staging” should actually mean
04:02 - How environment and content drift create production failures
05:18 - Why identical deployment artifacts matter more than identical infrastructure size
06:25 - Lessons from outages and high-pressure production incidents
08:20 - Why startups need incident runbooks and playbooks
09:48 - Containment before investigation or blame
10:35 - What a runbook is and why shared knowledge matters
12:02 - Turning incident reports into better, living runbooks
13:27 - Building engineering practices before a startup grows
15:27 - Why SRE should be treated as a team practice
17:08 - Preventing burnout through proactive leadership and planning
18:36 - Automating repetitive work with AI and connected tools
20:13 - Friday deployments: when they are acceptable and when they are not
20:45 - The myth that DevOps is a job title rather than a methodology
21:03 - What CTOs should know about technology, environments, and stakeholders
22:18 - Why production incidents cannot be predicted but teams can be prepared
23:18 - How incidents strengthen teams when they lead to learning
25:05 - Solving people and process problems through cross-functional DevOps teams
27:19 - Replacing blame culture with better organizational habits
30:17 - Balancing speed, least privilege, and regulated production environments
31:44 - Presenting security initiatives through business impact and cost
32:49 - Final advice for people pursuing DevOps and SRE careers