scott-garvin release-cutover
A release isn't an event, it's a checklist where every step can be undone. This skill composes safe-migrations (the schema changes) and production-write-gate (every mutating step is confirmed before it runs).
The ordered sequence
- Migrations first, gated. Apply forward migrations through the pipeline, behind an error gate that halts the release the moment one fails. (safe-migrations authored them with rollbacks; production-write-gate confirms applying them.)
- Smoke-test off to the side. Verify on a staging target that isn't yet taking real traffic. A smoke test after the swap is an incident report, not a gate.
- Swap, then the mandatory restart. Cut traffic over, then do the restart or warm-up step the platform actually requires. It's the step that's easiest to skip and quietly breaks the first requests.
- Promote the rest in lockstep. Background workers and functions move with the app, never left a version behind the code that expects them.
- Rollback rehearsed, not hypothetical. Every step above has a known reverse you've actually run. A release is only as safe as its least-tested rollback.
Config wiring
A new setting is defined in every place that reads it, with a code-side default for the "not yet configured" window, so a half-deployed release never reads an empty config and behaves as though a feature is off when it isn't.