28 Aug 2025 · Cloud
By Yerlin Ugarte
A product that cannot be deployed is a draft. Hosting, environments and a runbook are part of the craft.
I favour boring, durable infrastructure: Git-based deploys, preview URLs for every change, environment variables that are not hardcoded, and a domain a client can point without calling me at midnight. Spectacle in the host is usually a future outage.
Vercel and modern Node runtimes cover most of the products I ship. When a client already has a host, I adapt. Documentation is not an appendix: DNS, env keys, rollback and who owns the account are written down. The test is simple — can someone else restart this in six months?
Cloud work, for an independent practice, is also a security decision. Secrets do not live in the repo. Preview environments do not hold real medical or civil records. Production is a privilege, not a default.