Rollback
Fast, automated recovery from any deployment.
less than a minute
Definition
Rollback on-demand means you can quickly and safely revert to a previous working version of your application at any time. Rollback requires no special approval, manual intervention, or complex procedures. Rolling back is as simple and reliable as deploying forward.
Key principles
- Fast: Rollback completes in minutes, not hours. Target < 5 minutes.
- Automated: No manual steps or special procedures. Single command or click.
- Safe: Rollback is validated the same way as forward deployment.
- Simple: Any team member can execute it without specialized knowledge.
- Tested: Rollback mechanism is regularly tested, not only 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