deployment-procedures

Safe production deployment follows a 5-phase process: prepare by verifying tests and builds, back up the current state, deploy while monitoring, verify health endpoints and key flows, then confirm or rollback. Zero-downtime strategies include rolling, blue-green, and canary releases.

Rolling deployments replace instances one by one and suit standard releases. Blue-green switches traffic between two environments for easy rollback of high-risk changes. Canary shifts traffic gradually to validate changes with real users before full rollout.

Rollback immediately when the service is down or critical errors appear. Consider rollback when performance degrades more than 50 percent. For minor issues, fix forward only if the fix is quick, and always rollback first and debug afterward.

On Vercel or Netlify, redeploy the previous commit. On Railway or Render, use the dashboard rollback. With Docker, redeploy the previous image tag. On Kubernetes, run kubectl rollout undo. For VPS with PM2, restore the backup and restart.

Verify four categories before deploying: code quality with passing tests and reviews, a successful production build, correct environment variables and secrets, and safety measures including a completed backup and a documented rollback plan. Also notify the team and prepare monitoring.

Friday deployments leave little time to monitor and respond to issues before the weekend, when team availability drops. Deploy early in the week instead so you can actively monitor for at least 15 minutes and respond to problems with full staffing.