engineering
Incident Response Runbooks for Teams That Never Sleep
A follow-the-sun on-call model sounds elegant on a slide, but most teams that try it underestimate the handoff cost. If your US, UK, and UAE engineers are not writing structured handoff notes at the end of every shift, the model just becomes three separate on-call rotations that happen to share a Slack channel.
Runbooks need to be written for the engineer who is picking up an incident cold, at an hour when the person who understands the system best is asleep. That means explicit rollback commands, not "revert the deploy" — the exact command, the exact service name, and what a successful rollback looks like in the dashboards.
Severity definitions should be calibrated once, in writing, and referenced during every incident — not re-litigated live while a service is down. A P1 in your runbook should mean the same thing to the on-call engineer in London at 3am as it does to the one in New York at 3pm.
Apeniq helps distributed engineering teams build runbooks and on-call processes that hold up across time zones — reach out if your last incident postmortem included the phrase "we should have written this down."