• Production mindset: Think in failure modes, not just success cases • 5 failure patterns: OOMKilled, cascading failures, config drift, silent degradation, manual toil • 6-item production readiness checklist: Resource limits, health checks, security context, observability, graceful shutdown, rollback plan • Real-world example: How skipping the checklist caused a 3-hour outage • Actionable next steps: Audit your workloads, enforce the checklist, run chaos experiments