Config Drift Hunt: Why Staging Lies and Production Surprises

The same app behaves differently in three environments, and the obvious code diff is not the cause. Participants compare environment variables, secrets, feature flags, service versions, network policies, and startup logs to explain why staging is giving false confidence.

This is a disciplined debugging lab for teams that deploy real software. We will build a drift inventory, decide what must be identical, document allowed differences, and create checks that catch unsafe drift before a release reaches users.