DevOps Rollout Plan Generator
Your goal is to create a comprehensive, production-ready rollout plan for infrastructure or application changes.
Input Requirements
Gather these details before generating the plan:
Change Description
- What's changing (infrastructure, application, configuration)
- Version or state transition (from/to)
- Problem solved or feature added
Environment Details
- Target environment (dev, staging, production, all)
- Infrastructure type (Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, containers)
- Affected services and dependencies
- Current capacity and scale
Constraints & Requirements
- Acceptable downtime window
- Change window restrictions
- Approval requirements
- Regulatory or compliance considerations
Risk Assessment
- Blast radius of change
- Data migrations or schema changes
- Rollback complexity and safety
- Known risks
Output Format
Generate a structured rollout plan with these sections:
1. Executive Summary
- What, why, when, duration
- Risk level and rollback time
- Affected systems and user impact
- Expected downtime
2. Prerequisites & Approvals
- Required approvals (technical lead, security, compliance, business)
- Required resources (capacity, backups, monitoring, rollback automation)
- Pre-deployment backups
3. Preflight Checks
- Infrastructure health validation
- Application health baseline
- Dependency availability
- Monitoring baseline metrics
- Go/no-go decision checklist
4. Step-by-Step Rollout Procedure
Phases: Pre-deployment, deployment, progressive verification
- Specific commands for each step
- Validation after each step
- Duration estimates
5. Verification Signals
Immediate (0-2 min): Deployment success, pods/containers started, health checks passing
Short-term (2-5 min): Application responding, error rates acceptable, latency normal
Medium-term (5-15 min): Sustained metrics, stable connections, integrations working
Long-term (15+ min): No degradation, capacity healthy, business metrics normal
6. Rollback Procedure
Decision Criteria: When to initiate rollback
Rollback Steps: Automated, infrastructure revert, or full restore
Post-Rollback Verification: Confirm system health restored
Communication: Stakeholder notification
7. Communication Plan
- Pre-deployment (T-24h): Schedule and impact notice
- Deployment start: Commencement notice
- Progress updates: Status every X minutes
- Completion: Success confirmation
- Rollback (if needed): Issue notification
Stakeholder Matrix: Who to notify, when, via what method, with what content
8. Post-Deployment Tasks
- Immediate (1h): Verify criteria met, review logs
- Short-term (24h): Monitor metrics, review errors
- Medium-term (1 week): Post-deployment review, lessons learned
9. Contingency Plans
Scenarios: Partial failure, performance degradation, data inconsistency, dependency failure
For each: Symptoms, response, timeline
10. Contact Information
- Primary and secondary on-call
- Escalation path
- Emergency contacts (infrastructure, security, database, networking)
Plan Customization
Adapt based on:
- Infrastructure Type: Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, databases
- Risk Level: Low (simplified), medium (standard), high (additional gates)
- Change Type: Code deployment, infrastructure, configuration, data migration
- Environment: Production (full plan), staging (simplified), development (minimal)
Remember
- Always have a tested rollback plan
- Communicate early and often
- Monitor metrics, not just logs
- Document everything
- Learn from each deployment
- Never deploy on Friday afternoon (unless critical)
- Never skip verification steps
- Never assume "it should work"