VAMFI Deployment Plan
Produce a detailed deployment plan with rollout strategy, go/no-go criteria, rollback procedures, and a release checklist. Treat every production deployment as a risk management exercise.
Overview
A deployment plan is not an afterthought — it is the bridge between working code and a production service. This skill produces a plan that is executable by any engineer on the team, not only the person who wrote the code.
Deployment Strategy Selection
Select the appropriate strategy based on risk and system characteristics:
| Strategy | When to Use | Rollback Speed | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rolling update | Stateless services, low risk | Fast (redeploy) | Low |
| Blue-Green | Zero-downtime required, fast rollback needed | Instant (switch) | Low |
| Canary | High-traffic, gradual risk validation needed | Fast (redirect traffic) | Very Low |
| Feature flags | Business-controlled release, A/B testing | Instant (toggle) | Very Low |
| Big bang | Schema migrations, monolith, unavoidable downtime | Slow (manual rollback) | High |
For database schema changes: always use backwards-compatible migrations (expand/contract pattern).
Deployment Plan Structure
# Deployment Plan: [Service/Feature Name]
Release Date: [YYYY-MM-DD] | Release Manager: [Role]
## Deployment Strategy
[Selected strategy and rationale]
## Pre-Deployment Checklist
- [ ] All acceptance criteria passing in staging
- [ ] Performance baseline validated in staging
- [ ] Security gate PASSED
- [ ] Database migrations tested and reversible
- [ ] Runbook reviewed by on-call engineer
- [ ] Rollback procedure tested in staging
- [ ] Monitoring dashboards prepared
- [ ] On-call engineer briefed and available
- [ ] Change record raised (if required)
## Deployment Steps
| Step | Action | Owner | Duration | Validation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | [Run DB migration] | DevOps | 5 min | [verify row count] |
| 2 | [Deploy new container version] | DevOps | 3 min | [health check passes] |
| 3 | [Smoke test critical paths] | QA | 10 min | [checklist passes] |
| 4 | [Enable feature flag for 10% of traffic] | Product | 1 min | [error rate stable] |
| 5 | [Monitor for 30 minutes] | On-call | 30 min | [SLOs met] |
| 6 | [Enable for 100% of traffic] | Product | 1 min | [error rate stable] |
## Go/No-Go Criteria
**Go**: All pre-deployment checklist items checked AND error rate < [threshold] in first 10 minutes
**No-Go**: Any pre-deployment checklist item not met OR error rate > [threshold] at any point
## Rollback Procedure
| Trigger | Action | Owner | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Error rate > [X]% | Disable feature flag / revert traffic | On-call | < 2 min |
| Service unavailable | Redeploy previous image | DevOps | < 5 min |
| Data corruption | Roll back DB migration | DBA | [estimate] |
## Post-Deployment Checklist
- [ ] SLOs met for 1 hour post-deployment
- [ ] No P0 or P1 incidents raised
- [ ] Deployment notes updated in runbook
- [ ] Feature flag removal task created (with date)
- [ ] Stakeholders notified of successful release
Additional Resources
references/migration-patterns.md— Backwards-compatible database migration patternsassets/deployment-plan-template.md— Blank deployment plan template