Rollback and Roll-Forward Runbook

Write a deployment rollback plan that actually works.

Added October 15, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked for clarity and placeholders; not reviewed by a lawyer, accountant, clinician or other professional. How these prompts are made

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Write a rollback and roll-forward runbook for [SERVICE_NAME]. Deployment mechanism: [DEPLOY_MECHANISM]. Data stores and migrations: [DATA_STORES]. Dependencies on other services: [DEPENDENCIES]. On-call team: [ON_CALL].

The runbook must contain: decision criteria for rollback versus roll-forward (with numbers for error rate, latency, and duration); step-by-step rollback commands in generic form with a verify step after each; how to handle database migrations that cannot be reversed; how to handle queued messages and cached data; communication steps with a message template; and a post-rollback checklist. Mark each step as safe to automate or requires human judgement. Include a tabletop exercise of five questions to test the runbook with the team.

Make the runbook usable at 3 a.m.: use short imperative sentences, put the decision criteria first, and keep any step that needs judgement on its own line labelled DECIDE. Add a table of the three most likely failure types for this kind of deployment with the first command to run for each, and a final section on what to record for the post-incident review.

Add an appendix with a filled example for an invented service called orders-api that runs three replicas behind a load balancer and uses one relational database. Show the decision criteria with sample numbers (error rate above 2 percent for 5 minutes, p95 latency above 1.5 seconds for 10 minutes), the first six rollback steps with a verify line after each, and one DECIDE line about a migration that added a non-null column. Label every number in the example as an illustration to be replaced with mine. Then add a short communication timeline for the first hour (minute 0 acknowledge, minute 15 first update, minute 30 decision announced, minute 60 status), a two-line template for each message, and a checklist for the person who takes over the runbook at a shift change in the middle of a rollback.

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