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Case study · 2026
Governed releases & 3-2-1 backups
Lead Engineer · Her Aviation Era
Two-environment release pipeline with gated CI/CD, automated migration checks, expand/contract schema strategy, and an encrypted daily 3-2-1 backup/disaster-recovery pipeline.
Overview
A team of one can't afford a bad deploy — there's no on-call rotation to catch it. So Her Aviation Era ships through the same governance a good platform team would enforce, automated end to end.
Every change flows feature branch → staging environment → production with verification at each stage. Database changes are append-only migrations applied to staging first, and production migrations run through a manually-confirmed CI job that takes a pre-migration backup before touching anything.
Highlights
- Two-environment release pipeline (staging → production) with gated CI/CD on every PR via GitHub Actions
- Automated migration checks and an expand/contract schema strategy for zero-downtime changes
- Daily encrypted 3-2-1 backups: three copies, two storage types, one off-site (Cloudflare R2)
- Postgres Row-Level Security audited across all tables; GDPR-aligned account deletion
- SemVer-tagged releases with changelogs and a public what's-new feed
Stack
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD
- PostgreSQL
- Security