Deploying with Confidence

Stressful deploys are a symptom, not a personality trait of the team. When a release is scary, it's usually because it's large, irreversible, or unobservable — sometimes all three.

Ship smaller and more often. Decouple deploy from release with feature flags so code can reach production long before it reaches users.

Rehearse the rollback. A rollback path you've never executed is a hypothesis, and production is a poor place to test hypotheses.