What is On-call?
A rotation where team members are responsible for responding to production incidents outside business hours.
Why It Matters
On-call ensures someone is always available to fix critical issues that affect users.
Real-World Example
The on-call developer receiving a 2am alert about the payment system being down and working to restore it.
“Understanding terms like On-call matters because it helps you have better conversations with developers and make smarter decisions about your software. You do not need to be technical. You just need to know enough to ask the right questions.”
Related Terms
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Related Terms
Uptime
The percentage of time your application is available and working
Monitoring
Continuously observing your application and infrastructure to detect problems and understand performance.
Postmortem
A meeting and document analysing what went wrong after an incident, focused on learning and prevention.
Full-stack
Working on both the frontend (what users see) and backend (the server and database) of an application
TypeScript
JavaScript with added type checking that catches errors before your code runs
JavaScript
The programming language that makes websites interactive and dynamic