Stonetusker Insights · Five-minute checklist

Ultra-Scale and High Availability: 5-Minute Delivery Risk Checklist and Dates to Watch

Eight yes or no questions for teams whose platforms must stay up through every release and every peak. Each one links to the page that explains it, and the dates below show which gaps carry a deadline.

For: Leaders of platform and release teams in ecommerce, travel, gaming and streaming or advertising, where an outage at peak costs revenue.

By Subeesh Sivanandan, Founder, Stonetusker Systems · Updated 29 October 2026 · About 3 minutes to read · PDF version

The short version

Eight yes or no questions about delivery risk for ultra-scale, high availability platforms.
Ask your team to answer them in five minutes, from what they know today, with no checks run first.
A "no" marks a gap worth a closer look. The dates below show which gaps carry a deadline.

Eight questions for your team

Have you confirmed that none of your clusters still run the retired Ingress NGINX controller, or that each one that does has a planned move? Why it matters
Do all your clusters run a Kubernetes version that still receives patch releases? Why it matters
Does every public security certificate renew automatically, with no calendar reminder involved? Why it matters
Do your certificate renewal jobs work from the certificate lifetime, instead of a fixed number of days before expiry? Why it matters
Do your builds and clusters pull images signed in or from your own mirror, so public pull limits cannot stop a release? Why it matters
Has someone timed a rollback of your revenue service in the last quarter, and did it take minutes? Why it matters
Did most of last month's risky changes reach customers behind a feature flag? Why it matters
Is there an error budget for the revenue path that decides when releases stop? Why it matters

Reading your answers

7 or 8 yes: in good shape. Ask the questions again each quarter.
4 to 6 yes: pick the first "no" that has a date attached, and give it an owner.
3 or fewer yes: start with the dated items below, in date order.

Dates for your team

Date	What changes	Details
March 2026 (passed)	Ingress NGINX end of support: no further releases, bug fixes or security updates. Existing installations keep running.¹	Ingress NGINX migration plan
27 October 2026 (passed)	Kubernetes 1.34 is out of maintenance. The maintained releases are 1.35, 1.36 and 1.37, and 1.35 leaves maintenance on 28 February 2027.²	Radar: Kubernetes 1.34
10 February 2027	Every certificate that Let's Encrypt issues or renews by default is valid for 64 days, and the authorization reuse period falls from 30 days to 10 days.³	Radar: 64-day certificates
15 March 2027	Public security certificates are limited to 100 days, and to 47 days from 15 March 2029.⁴	100-day certificates
Ongoing	Docker Hub limits anonymous pulls to 100 per six hours per network address, and signed-in Personal accounts to 200.⁵	Radar: Docker Hub limits

A note to forward to your team

Ultra-scale delivery risk checklist

Please answer the eight yes or no questions in this note from what you know today. It takes about five minutes.

Reply by [date] with:
1. The number of "yes" answers (out of 8)
2. The numbers of the questions answered "no"

Owner: [name]
Note: https://stonetusker.com/insights/checklist-ultra-scale.html

Want a second opinion?

Answer the eight questions with your team first. If you would like a second opinion, reply with two things only: the number of "yes" answers and the numbers of the questions answered "no". Nothing else is needed. Within five working days you receive a short written note on what to do first. It is free and confidential, and a call is optional.

Ask for a second opinion

The button opens an email to subeesh@stonetusker.com with the subject and the numbers to fill in. You can also use the contact page, or reply to the email or LinkedIn message that brought you here.

Next page for your situation

Peak-season release readiness: the 30-minute check behind questions 6 to 8.
Delivery Deadline Radar: every dated item for your archetype, with a check for each.

Sources

About the author

Subeesh Sivanandan is the Founder and CEO of Stonetusker Systems. He has worked for more than 27 years in release engineering, DevOps, platform engineering & embedded Linux. His career includes serving as the Principal Engineer & Manager of Release Engineering at Stryker, alongside earlier roles at Nokia, VeriSign, and IP Infusion. LinkedIn profile.

Revision history (recent 3 updates)

Version 1.0, 29 October 2026. Every fact on this page is checked against a minimum of two sources each month.

Version	Date	Change
1.0	29 October 2026	First edition