This was a really interesting article. I feel silly for asking this but why didn't you set up a script which did all of the maintenance, migration and deploy tasks automatically?
You obviously thought about this a lot but I don't see why you'd want two humans doing it instead of a script.
Thanks! We had been practicing on test servers and so we had the commands ready to be repeated, but you're right -- for reproducibility, a script would have been the way to go.
Not just for reproducibility, but to avoid human errors. I always just get nervous when humans make changes to production environments. I'd much rather have a tested script do it.
You obviously thought about this a lot but I don't see why you'd want two humans doing it instead of a script.