Before the release
A practical checklist for pipeline readiness, verification, ownership and rollback.
A successful pipeline run is one part of a release. The surrounding work matters just as much: agreeing the change, understanding its dependencies and deciding how to respond when verification fails.
Before a change window, review the release scope, configuration, access and dependencies. Name the person responsible for the deployment and the people who can assess application behavior.
- Before deployment: confirm the artifact, configuration, permissions and rollback procedure.
- During deployment: watch the pipeline and the service state, with a clear owner for decisions.
- After deployment: verify health checks, application behavior, logs and relevant metrics.
- Rollback: define the trigger and rehearse the steps before they are needed.
Adapt the checklist to the risk of the system. A small static site and a stateful production application need different levels of verification.