devops-rollout-plan

SKILL.md

DevOps Rollout Plan Generator

Your goal is to create a comprehensive, production-ready rollout plan for infrastructure or application changes.

Input Requirements

Gather these details before generating the plan:

Change Description

What's changing (infrastructure, application, configuration)

Version or state transition (from/to)

Problem solved or feature added

Environment Details

Target environment (dev, staging, production, all)

Infrastructure type (Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, containers)

Affected services and dependencies

Current capacity and scale

Constraints & Requirements

Acceptable downtime window

Change window restrictions

Approval requirements

Regulatory or compliance considerations

Risk Assessment

Blast radius of change

Data migrations or schema changes

Rollback complexity and safety

Known risks

Output Format

Generate a structured rollout plan with these sections:

1. Executive Summary

What, why, when, duration

Risk level and rollback time

Affected systems and user impact

Expected downtime

2. Prerequisites & Approvals

Required approvals (technical lead, security, compliance, business)

Required resources (capacity, backups, monitoring, rollback automation)

Pre-deployment backups

3. Preflight Checks

Infrastructure health validation

Application health baseline

Dependency availability

Monitoring baseline metrics

Go/no-go decision checklist

4. Step-by-Step Rollout Procedure

Phases: Pre-deployment, deployment, progressive verification

Specific commands for each step

Validation after each step

Duration estimates

5. Verification Signals

Immediate (0-2 min): Deployment success, pods/containers started, health checks passing
Short-term (2-5 min): Application responding, error rates acceptable, latency normal
Medium-term (5-15 min): Sustained metrics, stable connections, integrations working
Long-term (15+ min): No degradation, capacity healthy, business metrics normal

6. Rollback Procedure

Decision Criteria: When to initiate rollback
Rollback Steps: Automated, infrastructure revert, or full restore
Post-Rollback Verification: Confirm system health restored
Communication: Stakeholder notification

7. Communication Plan

Pre-deployment (T-24h): Schedule and impact notice

Deployment start: Commencement notice

Progress updates: Status every X minutes

Completion: Success confirmation

Rollback (if needed): Issue notification

Stakeholder Matrix: Who to notify, when, via what method, with what content

8. Post-Deployment Tasks

Immediate (1h): Verify criteria met, review logs

Short-term (24h): Monitor metrics, review errors

Medium-term (1 week): Post-deployment review, lessons learned

9. Contingency Plans

Scenarios: Partial failure, performance degradation, data inconsistency, dependency failure
For each: Symptoms, response, timeline

10. Contact Information

Primary and secondary on-call

Escalation path

Emergency contacts (infrastructure, security, database, networking)

Plan Customization

Adapt based on:

Infrastructure Type: Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, databases

Risk Level: Low (simplified), medium (standard), high (additional gates)

Change Type: Code deployment, infrastructure, configuration, data migration

Environment: Production (full plan), staging (simplified), development (minimal)

Remember

Always have a tested rollback plan

Communicate early and often

Monitor metrics, not just logs

Document everything

Learn from each deployment

Never deploy on Friday afternoon (unless critical)

Never skip verification steps

Never assume "it should work"