Do you understand the risks of deploying on days with limited support?

Deploying on a Friday has traditionally been risky due to limited post-deployment support over the weekend, potentially leaving issues unaddressed. Thanks to DevOps best practices, these concerns are largely mitigated by automated deployments, continuous integration, and real-time monitoring, making the deployment process smoother and more reliable.

Nonetheless, caution is recommended in certain situations.

While it is best to avoid deployments on days with limited support availability, sometimes urgent updates like security patches cannot wait.

How to be prepared?

Pre-Deployment communication

• Inform the team about the deployment and ensure that support staff or relevant team members are available if needed
• Notify all relevant stakeholders, acknowledging that you and the team are prepared to fix issues over the weekend if they occur

Deployment checklist and best practices

Every project should have a document to cover each step of the deployment:

• Pre-Deployment: Ensure that all project components are up-to-date and tested before deploymen
• Staging Deployment: Test the application and check for any errors before moving to production
• Production Deployment: Proceed to production only after confirming no issues in staging
• Post-Deployment: Monitor for any new issues
• Troubleshooting: Outline key contacts for support and provide step-by-step actions to address issues

How to mitigate the risk of a deployment?

• Use Feature Flags: Implement feature flags to control the rollout of new features. This allows for quick disabling of problematic features without a full rollback
• Ensure Comprehensive Monitoring: Make sure all necessary monitoring tools are in place to quickly identify any issues. For instance, you can use Application Insights