Blue-Green Deployment Rollback Checklist Builder
Build a production checklist for blue-green deployments, traffic switching, validation, rollback triggers, data compatibility, and release communications.
Prompt Template
You are a senior release engineer helping a team ship a blue-green deployment safely. Build a deployment and rollback checklist for: Application or service: [name, purpose, customer impact] Stack and runtime: [language, framework, containers, serverless, VM, mobile backend] Infrastructure: [Kubernetes, ECS, Vercel, load balancer, CDN, database, queues] Traffic switch mechanism: [load balancer weights, DNS, ingress, feature flag, service mesh, deploy platform] Current release scope: [code changes, config, schema, dependencies, infra, third-party integration] Stateful dependencies: [database, cache, queue, object storage, search index, cron jobs] Data migration status: [none, backward compatible, dual-write, destructive, unknown] Observability: [metrics, logs, traces, synthetic checks, SLOs, error tracking] Rollback objective: [instant traffic flip, previous image, database rollback, feature disable, hotfix] Environments tested: [staging, preview, canary, load test, smoke test] Team process: [approvers, on-call, incident channel, change window, customer comms] Constraints: [zero downtime, regulated change, high traffic event, limited DB rollback, cache warming] Create: 1. Go/no-go preflight checklist for code, config, data, infra, and people. 2. Blue and green environment readiness checks. 3. Traffic switch plan with percentage steps, hold times, validation checks, and owners. 4. Data compatibility checklist for migrations, writes, reads, queues, and background jobs. 5. Rollback triggers tied to metrics, logs, synthetic tests, customer reports, and SLO burn. 6. Rollback procedure with commands shown as placeholders and safety checks before each step. 7. Cache, queue, CDN, and long-running job considerations. 8. Stakeholder communication templates before, during, rollback, and success. 9. Post-deploy validation and monitoring window. 10. Post-incident notes if rollback is triggered, including timeline and prevention actions. Be conservative. If database changes are not backward compatible, flag that blue-green rollback may not be safe without a separate migration plan.
Example Output
Release Plan: Payments API v2.18
Go/No-Go
- Green environment passes health, auth, payment authorization, refund, and webhook smoke tests.
- Migration is backward compatible: new nullable column only, old code can read existing records.
- On-call, release owner, and support lead are in the incident channel.
Traffic Switch
| Step | Traffic to Green | Hold | Validation | Owner |
|---|---:|---:|---|---|
| 1 | 5% | 10 min | Error rate under 0.5%, p95 latency under 300 ms | Release lead |
| 2 | 25% | 15 min | Payment success within normal range | SRE |
| 3 | 100% | 30 min | Synthetic checkout and webhook replay pass | Backend lead |
Rollback Trigger
Rollback immediately if payment authorization errors exceed 1% for 5 minutes, webhook retries double baseline, or synthetic checkout fails twice in a row.
Rollback Procedure
Flip traffic back to blue using the approved load balancer change, pause new background workers in green, confirm blue error rate returns to baseline, and keep database migration in place because it is backward compatible.
Tips for Best Results
- 💡Include the data migration shape; rollback safety usually depends on data compatibility.
- 💡Define numeric rollback triggers before switching traffic.
- 💡Show commands as placeholders so teams adapt them to their deployment platform.
- 💡Keep the old environment warm until the monitoring window is complete.
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