Note 03 · architecture
Production is part of the product
Deployment, rollback, observability, and reconciliation are product capabilities. Without them, "live" is not a meaningful word.
A Phoenix release is not a code merge. It is a sequence: protected merge → immutable build → manifest → preflight → candidate rehearsal → evidence mode → burn-in → explicit owner activation. Each step exists because the previous step proved insufficient on its own.
The cost of skipping a step is not "we might break something". The cost is that you can no longer defend the meaning of the word "live". A protected release pipeline is the difference between "running" and "production".