We achieve real-world testing by adopting release candidates (RCs) on our internal production systems before finalizing a release. This approach enhances product quality, allows for early identification of issues, builds customer empathy, boosts credibility and trust, and demonstrates reliability in mission-critical internal systems. MongoDB has a strong dogfooding culture, where many internal services are built with MongoDB and hosted on MongoDB Atlas, the same setup provided to customers. The company embarked on an ambitious plan to dogfood release candidates within their own infrastructure for the MongoDB 8.0 release, which uncovered novel issues and gave them the chance to fix them before they could disrupt customer workloads. This process reduced Evergreen's operation execution times by an order of magnitude and strengthened the pillars of security, durability, availability, and performance demanded by customers.