Rollback Playbook

Rollback Playbook

You execute the reverse of a cutover safely and with evidence. Bring traffic back to EKS, restore data direction (if applicable), and produce a postmortem-ready timeline.

Purpose

Provide a tested, fast, evidenced way to undo a cutover step (or the whole cutover) without making the situation worse. Rollback is a first-class operation, not a fire drill.

When to use this skill

• A traffic-cutover gate trips or auto-rollback fires.
• The user identifies a regression after cutover and asks to roll back.
• A higher-tier dependency rolls back, and downstream workloads must follow.

Do NOT use to "delete the EKS cluster after rollback". That's post-migration-ops only after a stable, soaked GKE state.

Prerequisites

• The EKS source still exists, with replicas > 0 (or scalable to > 0). Default cutover practice is to scale-to-zero, not delete, exactly to support this.
• The source data system still exists and is in read-write or rapidly switchable state per the data-migration plan.
• The DNS / routing layer is reversible by the same mechanism that did the cutover.

Procedure

Step 1 — Stop the bleed (within seconds)

If a gate auto-fires:

1. The cutover script aborts at its current step.
2. The DNS / routing weight that just changed is reverted to the previous step (e.g., 50% → 10%).
3. If the gate is backend health level (not just SLO drift), revert to 0% on GKE immediately.

If a human invokes rollback:

# DNS-level immediate revert to 100% EKS
gcloud dns record-sets transaction start --zone=example-com
gcloud dns record-sets transaction remove api.example.com. --zone=example-com --type=A --ttl=60 || true
gcloud dns record-sets transaction add \
  --zone=example-com --name=api.example.com. --ttl=60 --type=A \
  --routing-policy-type=WRR \
  --routing-policy-data="100=$EKS_AS_IP;0=$GKE_TARGET"
gcloud dns record-sets transaction execute --zone=example-com

date "+%FT%TZ" >> $RUN_DIR/rollback.log
echo "Routing reverted to 100% EKS" >> $RUN_DIR/rollback.log

For a service-mesh routing rollback, set the VirtualService weights to (100, 0). For an L7-proxy front, push the previous config and reload.

Step 2 — Capacity check on EKS side

kubectl --context eks -n <ns> get hpa
kubectl --context eks -n <ns> get deploy
# If replicas were scaled to 0, scale back up to the pre-cutover count.
kubectl --context eks -n <ns> scale deploy/<name> --replicas=<n>
kubectl --context eks rollout status deploy/<name>

If EKS was decommissioned beyond the rollback window: this skill cannot help. Open a P1 incident.

Step 3 — Data direction

For workloads whose data system was already cut over:

• If the source data system is still read-write and synchronized (within the planned soak window): repoint app config to source DSN. Confirm replica direction is now reversed (target → source) or that the source is authoritative again.
• If the source is read-only: the rollback is bounded — the GKE-side writes since cutover will be lost on reversal. Surface this before executing the data-direction rollback. Do not silently lose writes.

For most workloads in the standard plan, the source is kept in read-only mode for a 14-day cool-down — meaning a rollback within that window incurs the loss of GKE-side writes. The rollback playbook makes this explicit and asks for confirmation.

Step 4 — Identity rollback

The KSA → GSA bindings stay in place; they are no-ops on EKS. The IRSA bindings on the source remain live during the cool-down period exactly to support this.

If WI federation back to AWS was set up (cross-cloud federation in identity-translation), no change needed.

Step 5 — Capture evidence

Within 30 minutes of rollback, capture:

• Cloud Monitoring screenshots of the SLO breach window.
• Cloud Logging slice of error log entries for the affected workload.
• The traffic-cutover execution log up to the rollback point.
• Output of the failing gate's check (check-gates.sh last invocation).
• Sample request traces showing the regression behavior.

Write to <run-dir>/11-cutover/<workload>/rollback-evidence/.

Step 6 — Generate the postmortem template

Render <run-dir>/11-cutover/<workload>/postmortem.md from templates/postmortem-template.md, populated with:

• Timeline (from execution.log + rollback.log).
• Trigger (which gate, what value, what threshold).
• Action (rollback, when, by whom).
• Impact (estimated request loss / latency excess; user-facing minutes if applicable).
• Hypotheses for the regression (the agent emits 2–3; the human picks).

Step 7 — Plan the next attempt

Do not silently retry. After a rollback:

1. The orchestrator marks the workload's cutover as rolled-back with timestamp.
2. The hypotheses must be addressed (load test, code change, config change) before re-attempting.
3. The next attempt requires explicit user confirmation and a written summary of what changed since the failed attempt.

Decision points

Outputs / Deliverables

11-cutover/<workload>/
├── rollback.log
├── rollback-evidence/
│   ├── monitoring-screenshots/
│   ├── log-slice.json
│   ├── traces/
│   └── gate-output.txt
├── postmortem.md
└── next-attempt-plan.md

Validation

After rollback, the agent confirms:

• kubectl get httproute / kubectl get virtualservice shows the reverted weights.
• DNS query (dig +short) returns only EKS endpoints (or the configured weights).
• EKS replica health: pods Ready, error rate baseline.
• SLO returns to baseline within the next observation window.
• Postmortem template is filled in (no TBD in trigger / impact / next attempt).

Escalation triggers

• Rollback executed but SLO does not recover within 15 minutes — there is a broader issue beyond the cutover; escalate to incident response, do not retry.
• Source EKS state has degraded beyond rollback (replica count truly zero with no scale-out path, decommissioning started). Surface immediately; this is an incident.
• Rollback would erase data writes that affect another workload's correctness. Do not auto-execute; require explicit user instruction.

Common pitfalls

• Rolling back without evidence. The next attempt will fail the same way. Capture before retrying.
• Forgetting that rollback != fix. Rollback restores state; it doesn't fix the root cause. The orchestrator tracks both.
• Not surfacing data loss. A rollback after writes have happened on GKE loses those writes unless replication was bidirectional. State this in plain English before executing.
• Re-attempting the same cutover with the same plan. Don't. Address the hypothesis, document the change, and require sign-off.
• Treating rollback as a failure. It's not. It's a sign the gates worked.

References

• Canonical sources: reference/sources.md.
• SRE Workbook — Postmortem Culture.
• SRE Workbook — Reliable Product Launches.
• traffic-cutover — defines gates and ramp.
• data-migration — defines source-vs-target data direction.
• templates/postmortem-template.md