Arup Chakrabarti, operations engineer manager at PagerDuty, delivered a talk at Heavybit Industries discussing common pitfalls in operations teams and strategies to prevent them. Key issues include improper infrastructure setup, where personal accounts are often used instead of corporate ones, and the importance of selecting appropriate tools for deployments. Chakrabarti also emphasizes the need for separate test and production environments, effective configuration management with tools like Ansible, and consistent deployment practices using automation and orchestration tools. Incident management processes should be well-documented and inclusive of everyone involved in production code, necessitating platforms like PagerDuty for effective communication. Monitoring and alerting systems are essential from the start, with tools such as StatsD and Datadog recommended. Regular backups to platforms like S3 and adherence to high availability principles, including using multiple servers and clustered datastores, are vital. Security practices are highlighted, focusing on using gateway boxes instead of SSH, configuring individual user accounts, and activating encryption during development. Finally, internal IT needs, such as consistent hardware and efficient onboarding processes, are important for operational efficiency.