Lessons Learned
What changed once the platform became real.
Hostnames beat subpaths for app separation
Dedicated subdomains are easier to reason about than forcing unrelated applications into one path tree.
Retention is part of reliability
Short, explicit log and metric retention is healthier than collecting data the host cannot keep safely.
Simple CI/CD ages better
GitHub-hosted Actions plus SSH deploy are easier to audit and recover than an unnecessary local runner setup.
Documentation is operational work
Runbooks, DNS plans, routing maps, and rollback steps reduce ambiguity when the system changes later.