deployment-planning

name	Deployment Planning
description	Plan software deployments with rollback strategies, monitoring, and health checks
version	1.0
tags	["engineering","operations","planning"]
complexity	intermediate
requires_tools	[]

Process

1. Pre-deployment checklist:
   • All tests passing
   • Code reviewed and approved
   • Database migrations tested
   • Environment variables configured
   • Dependencies up to date
2. Deployment strategy — Choose approach:
   • Rolling update: Gradual replacement, zero-downtime
   • Blue-green: Switch traffic between two environments
   • Canary: Route small percentage of traffic to new version
   • Big bang: Replace all at once (simplest, riskiest)
3. Rollback plan — How to revert if something goes wrong
4. Health checks — What endpoints/metrics confirm the deployment is healthy
5. Monitoring — What to watch during and after deployment
6. Communication — Who needs to know, when to notify

Output Format

## Deployment Runbook: [Release Name/Version]

### Pre-Deployment
- [ ] Tests passing on CI
- [ ] Database migration tested on staging
- [ ] Environment variables verified
- [ ] Rollback procedure documented

### Deployment Steps
1. [Step-by-step deployment procedure]

### Health Verification
- [ ] Health endpoint returns 200: GET /health
- [ ] Key metric within normal range: [metric name]
- [ ] No error spike in logs (check for 5 minutes)

### Rollback Procedure
1. [Step-by-step rollback if deployment fails]

### Post-Deployment
- [ ] Monitor error rates for 30 minutes
- [ ] Verify key user flows
- [ ] Update status page / notify team

Guidelines

• Always have a rollback plan before deploying
• Test migrations on a copy of production data first
• Deploy during low-traffic periods when possible
• Monitor error rates closely for 30 minutes after deployment
• Keep deployments small — smaller changes are easier to debug
• Document everything — the next person to deploy should be able to follow your runbook