deployment-strategy
Deployment strategy patterns for zero-downtime releases. Covers blue-green, canary, rolling, and recreate strategies with rollback procedures, health checks, feature flags, progressive delivery, and environment promotion workflows. Use when choosing a deployment strategy, implementing rollback procedures, configuring health checks, setting up environment promotion pipelines, planning progressive delivery with feature flags, or reducing blast radius during releases.
Resources
1Install
npx skillscat add oakoss/agent-skills/deployment-strategy Install via the SkillsCat registry.
Deployment Strategy
Overview
Covers deployment strategy selection, rollback safety, and progressive delivery patterns. Focuses on zero-downtime release techniques, blast radius management, and environment promotion workflows from development through production.
When to use: Choosing between blue-green, canary, or rolling deployments, implementing rollback procedures, configuring health checks and readiness gates, planning environment promotion workflows, integrating feature flags for progressive delivery.
When NOT to use: CI/CD pipeline mechanics and GitHub Actions workflows (use ci-cd-architecture skill), infrastructure provisioning and cloud platform selection (use ci-cd-architecture skill), application architecture decisions (use framework-specific skills).
Quick Reference
| Need | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Instant rollback | Blue-green (swap traffic back to previous environment) |
| Gradual risk validation | Canary (route 1-5% traffic, monitor, then expand) |
| Default Kubernetes updates | Rolling (replace pods incrementally with maxSurge/maxUnavail) |
| Full environment replace | Recreate (stop all old, start all new; accepts brief downtime) |
| Feature-level control | Feature flags (decouple deploy from release) |
| Database schema changes | Expand-contract migration (additive first, remove later) |
| Multi-environment promotion | dev -> staging -> production with gates between each |
| Blast radius reduction | Canary + feature flags + automated rollback triggers |
| Health verification | Liveness, readiness, and startup probes at infrastructure level |
| Rollback without redeploy | Feature flags to disable problematic code paths |
Common Mistakes
| Mistake | Correct Pattern |
|---|---|
| No rollback plan before deploying | Define rollback procedure and verify it works before every production release |
| Destructive database migrations alongside app deploy | Use expand-contract: add new columns/tables first, migrate data, remove old later |
| Canary without automated health monitoring | Set error rate and latency thresholds that auto-halt rollout when breached |
| Blue-green with shared mutable database | Use backward-compatible schema changes so both versions work against the same database |
| Feature flags without cleanup lifecycle | Assign an owner and removal date to every flag; treat stale flags as tech debt |
| Skipping staging and deploying directly to production | Promote through environments with automated gates between each stage |
| Rolling deploy without readiness probes | Configure readiness probes so traffic routes only to healthy instances |
| Same environment config across all stages | Use environment-specific configuration with secrets management per environment |
| Manual rollback procedures in incident response | Automate rollback triggers based on error rate, latency, and health check thresholds |
| Testing only happy paths before release | Include failure scenario testing: rollback drills, chaos testing, degraded mode testing |
Delegation
- Audit deployment safety of existing infrastructure: Use
Exploreagent to review deployment configs, health check definitions, and rollback procedures - Implement a specific deployment strategy: Use
Taskagent to configure blue-green, canary, or rolling deployment for a target platform - Plan migration from one deployment strategy to another: Use
Planagent to evaluate current strategy, define migration steps, and identify risks
If the
ci-cd-architectureskill is available, delegate CI/CD pipeline setup and GitHub Actions workflow configuration to it.
Otherwise, recommend:npx skills add oakoss/agent-skills --skill ci-cd-architecture
References
Categories
Install
npx skillscat add oakoss/agent-skills/deployment-strategy Install via the SkillsCat registry.