Deployment Procedures

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Overview

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What This Skill Provides

• Platform Selection: Choosing the right deployment platform
• Pre-Deployment Checklist: Critical verifications before deploying
• 5-Phase Deployment Process: Prepare, Backup, Deploy, Verify, Confirm
• Rollback Strategies: When and how to rollback deployments
• Zero-Downtime Patterns: Rolling, Blue-Green, Canary deployments
• Emergency Procedures: Handling service outages
• Decision-Making Framework: Principles over scripts

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Philosophy

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Platform Selection

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Decision Tree

What are you deploying?
│
├── Static site / JAMstack
│   └── Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages
│
├── Simple web app
│   ├── Managed → Railway, Render, Fly.io
│   └── Control → VPS + PM2/Docker
│
├── Microservices
│   └── Container orchestration
│
└── Serverless
    └── Edge functions, Lambda

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Platform-Specific Methods

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Pre-Deployment Principles

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The 4 Verification Categories

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Pre-Deployment Checklist

• All tests passing
• Code reviewed and approved
• Production build successful
• Environment variables verified
• Database migrations ready (if any)
• Rollback plan documented
• Team notified
• Monitoring ready

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The 5-Phase Deployment Process

1. PREPARE
   └── Verify code, build, env vars

2. BACKUP
   └── Save current state before changing

3. DEPLOY
   └── Execute with monitoring open

4. VERIFY
   └── Health check, logs, key flows

5. CONFIRM or ROLLBACK
   └── All good? Confirm. Issues? Rollback.

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Phase Principles

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Use Cases

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When to Use This Skill

• Planning a production deployment
• Setting up deployment pipelines
• Handling deployment failures
• Implementing rollback procedures
• Choosing deployment strategies

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Example Scenarios

1. First Deploy: “Help me deploy this Next.js app to Vercel”
2. Rollback: “The deployment broke production, how do I rollback?”
3. Zero-Downtime: “Deploy without taking the site offline”
4. Emergency: “Service is down after deployment”

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Post-Deployment Verification

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What to Verify

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Verification Window

• First 5 minutes: Active monitoring
• 15 minutes: Confirm stable
• 1 hour: Final verification
• Next day: Review metrics

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Rollback Principles

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When to Rollback

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Rollback Strategy by Platform

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Rollback Principles

1. Speed over perfection: Rollback first, debug later
2. Don’t compound errors: One rollback, not multiple changes
3. Communicate: Tell team what happened
4. Post-mortem: Understand why after stable

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Zero-Downtime Deployment

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Strategies

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Selection Principles

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Emergency Procedures

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Service Down Priority

1. Assess: What’s the symptom?
2. Quick fix: Restart if unclear
3. Rollback: If restart doesn’t help
4. Investigate: After stable

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Investigation Order

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Anti-Patterns to Avoid

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Best Practices

1. Small, frequent deploys over big releases
2. Feature flags for risky changes
3. Automate repetitive steps
4. Document every deployment
5. Review what went wrong after issues
6. Test rollback before you need it

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Related Skills

• server-management: Server operations and monitoring
• clean-code: Code quality before deployment
• lint-and-validate: Pre-deployment validation
• bash-linux: Server commands and scripts
• powershell-windows: Windows deployment scripts

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Which Agents Use This Skill

• devops-engineer: Primary user for all deployment operations

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Decision Checklist

• Platform-appropriate procedure?
• Backup strategy ready?
• Rollback plan documented?
• Monitoring configured?
• Team notified?
• Time to monitor after?

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Tools Available

• Read, Glob, Grep: For checking deployment configs
• Bash: For deployment commands