The deadlines that break production

Most outages are surprises. Some are not: they were scheduled months in advance, and nobody was watching the calendar.

Four kinds of scheduled outage

• Certificates. A TLS certificate has a hard end date. Automated renewal fails silently more often than anyone likes to admit: a DNS change, a moved load balancer, an expired API token for the DNS provider.
• Domains. Registrations lapse when the card on file expires or the person who owned the registrar account leaves.
• Credentials and licenses. API keys with forced rotation, signing certificates, software licenses and annual subscriptions all have dates.
• Vendor changes. API versions are sunset, SDKs are deprecated, free tiers end. The notice is in a changelog you do not read.

What helps

1. Put every date in one place, with an owner.
2. Get alerted with enough lead time to act calmly: 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 days.
3. Treat an unknown date as a problem, not as "probably fine".

That is exactly what we built StackClock to do. Start free and add your first domain.