First-ship lessons

A first ship to a cold cluster can expose ordering assumptions. Secret preflight, namespace creation, CSI projection, cluster add-ons, and Restate registration each have distinct readiness requirements. Follow the current navigator ops command sequence and stop when a preflight fails; do not seed plaintext Secrets or bypass CLI checks with manual cluster commands.

Before a live ship, confirm that the selected row's approved external configuration contains the required encrypted secret objects and capability settings, that its image exists, and that cluster add-ons needed by admission are ready. The offline example plan does not perform those live checks. After a real ship, verify rollout, Restate registration, /readyz, /version, certificate readiness, DNS, and the browser surface before recording completion.