Deployment runbook
Purpose: The standard sequence for a production release, with verification at every step — copy and adapt.
Who this page is for
| Audience | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| Platform engineers | Executors |
| All engineers | Know what happens to your code |
Pre-flight (T-1 day)
- [ ] Release notes + change list circulated; approvals recorded
- [ ] Stage soak complete: gates green (pipeline), UAT signed off
- [ ] Rollback plan for THIS release written (rollback); previous artefact confirmed present
- [ ] Author backup verified recent; maintenance/backup windows checked for collisions
- [ ] Comms: authors notified of the author-deploy window
Execution
1. AUTHOR deploy artefact → wait bundles Active → /system/health green
→ author smoke: login, edit+publish a canary page
2. PUBLISH rolling, per instance:
drain from LB → deploy → bundles Active + health green
→ direct smoke (render canary pages, .model.json, error.log scan)
→ rejoin LB → watch dashboards 5 min → next instance
3. DISPATCHER (only if config changed): apply via config pipeline → validate → reload
→ selective flush only for changed render output
4. VERIFY end-to-end through CDN: canary pages, new feature checks, synthetic probes green
5. CLOSE tag deployed, dashboards annotated, release channel notifiedVerification is not optional decoration
Each arrow above has a concrete check with a pass condition. "Deployed fine" means: all bundles Active, health checks green, canary renders match expectation, error.log clean of new ERRORs for N minutes, dashboards flat. Anything else triggers the rollback decision tree, while the blast radius is still one instance.
Common deviations
| Situation | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| DB-like content migration in release | Run migration step between author and publish phases, per its own plan |
| Dispatcher filter change for new endpoint | Dispatcher step becomes mandatory, BEFORE publish smoke of that endpoint |
| Index definition change | Deploy, then monitor reindexing before calling it done (index management) |