Rollback

Fast, automated recovery from any deployment.

  less than a minute  

Definition

Rollback on-demand means the ability to quickly and safely revert to a previous working version of your application at any time, without requiring special approval, manual intervention, or complex procedures. It should be as simple and reliable as deploying forward.

Key Principles

  1. Fast: Rollback completes in minutes, not hours. Target < 5 minutes.
  2. Automated: No manual steps or special procedures. Single command or click.
  3. Safe: Rollback is validated just like forward deployment.
  4. Simple: Any team member can execute it without specialized knowledge.
  5. Tested: Rollback mechanism is regularly tested, not just used in emergencies.

What Is Improved

  • Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR): Drops from hours to minutes
  • Deployment frequency: Increases due to reduced risk
  • Team confidence: Higher willingness to deploy
  • Customer satisfaction: Faster incident resolution
  • On-call burden: Reduced stress for on-call engineers

Migration Guidance

For detailed guidance on implementing rollback capability, see:

  • Rollback - Phase 2 pipeline practice with blue-green, canary, feature flag, and database-safe rollback patterns

Additional Resources