deploy-checklist

A production deployment checklist should verify CI status is green, required environment variables are present, database migrations are reviewed, and rollback plans are documented before deployment. Post-deployment, it must validate smoke tests, health endpoints, and monitoring alerts.

To verify database migration safety before deploying, review migrations for irreversibility, ensure they were dry-run tested, and confirm a documented rollback path exists. This prevents data integrity issues and ensures you can revert if the release fails.

Trigger a rollback after a production release when explicit thresholds are breached, such as elevated error rates, P95 latency spikes, data integrity issues, or critical 5xx path failures. Clear rollback trigger criteria prevent prolonged outages.

Validate application health post-deployment by checking health endpoint status, confirming startup logs show no unexpected errors, running smoke tests, and verifying error-rate and latency stability. Ensure no new monitoring alerts have triggered.

Yes, CI checks must pass and show a green status before proceeding with a release readiness workflow. Verifying CI health is a mandatory pre-deploy prerequisite to ensure the codebase is stable and safe for production rollout.

The best way to ensure safe production deployments with migrations is to use a checklist workflow covering CI checks, environment variable presence, migration dry-run testing, rollback documentation, smoke testing, and health endpoint verification.