deployment-procedures

Follow a five-phase process: prepare by verifying tests and environment variables, back up the current state, deploy while monitoring, verify health endpoints and key user flows, then confirm or roll back. Never deploy untested code or skip the backup step.

Rolling replaces instances one by one and suits standard releases. Blue-green switches traffic between two environments, giving easy rollback for high-risk changes. Canary shifts traffic gradually, letting you validate with real users before full rollout.

Roll back immediately if the service is down or critical errors appear. Consider rollback when performance degrades more than 50 percent. For minor issues, a quick fix forward is acceptable. Roll back first and debug after the service is stable.

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 the health endpoint responds, scan error logs for new exceptions, test key user flows, and confirm response times are acceptable. Monitor actively for the first 5 minutes, confirm stability at 15 minutes, and review metrics the next day.