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Learning: Production Deployment

How to Use This Page

  • Treat deployment as a controlled experiment.
  • Use gates and canaries by default.
  • Practice rollback before incidents happen.

Lesson 1: Fundamentals

Learn release gates and reproducible CI-driven deployment checks.

What You Learn

  • How build, test, and eval checks protect releases
  • Why release criteria must be explicit and versioned
  • How release metadata supports post-incident analysis

Walkthrough

  1. Define required checks before deployment.
  2. Run CI pipeline and collect release artifacts.
  3. Record version, config, and policy metadata.

Try It Yourself

  • Break one required test and confirm gate blocks release.
  • Add a required eval threshold for deployment eligibility.
  • Generate a release checklist from pipeline output.

Lesson 2: Intermediate Patterns

Learn canary rollout and comparative health analysis.

What You Learn

  • How small-slice canaries reduce blast radius
  • Why baseline comparison is required before promotion
  • How automated abort logic protects production users

Walkthrough

  1. Route a small traffic slice to canary.
  2. Compare canary metrics against stable baseline.
  3. Promote only when thresholds pass.

Try It Yourself

  • Inject a canary degradation and verify automatic abort.
  • Compare promotion decisions under strict vs lenient thresholds.
  • Add one canary metric that reflects user-facing quality.

Lesson 3: Production Patterns

Learn automated rollback and recovery readiness.

What You Learn

  • How rollback triggers reduce mean time to recovery
  • Why post-release health checks catch delayed failures
  • How rollback drills improve operational confidence

Walkthrough

  1. Implement rollback on critical threshold breach.
  2. Run scheduled post-release health checks.
  3. Store rollback evidence and incident timeline.

Try It Yourself

  • Execute a rollback drill in a controlled environment.
  • Measure time-to-detect and time-to-recover.
  • Propose one pipeline improvement to reduce recovery time.

Code Examples

  • Starter script: docs/starter/stage11_deployment.py
  • Stage architecture notes: docs/roadmap/stage-11-deployments-ci-and-rollbacks/architecture.md