Your web app update just failed catastrophically. How do you manage the rollback procedures?
When your web app update fails catastrophically, quick and efficient rollback procedures are essential. Here are key strategies to help you manage the process:
How do you handle web app rollback procedures? Share your experiences.
Your web app update just failed catastrophically. How do you manage the rollback procedures?
When your web app update fails catastrophically, quick and efficient rollback procedures are essential. Here are key strategies to help you manage the process:
How do you handle web app rollback procedures? Share your experiences.
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To manage a rollback after a failed web app deployment use following steps Detect the failure via monitoring tools. Assess the impact and identify the issue. Revert database changes if necessary. Test the app after rollback to ensure functionality. Monitor the app post-rollback for stability. Communicate with users if needed and investigate the cause. If you are using CiCD Pipeline configure rollback deployment. Do Rollback of deployment on previous versions.
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Effective rollback requires preparation and swift action. Use blue-green deployments or canary releases to minimize risks. When an update fails, assess the issue quickly, revert to the last stable version via version control, and ensure proper backups are in place. Automate rollback scripts to reduce errors and downtime. Communicate transparently with stakeholders about the issue, actions taken, and next steps. Post-rollback, conduct a root cause analysis to prevent recurrence and improve future deployments.
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Here are the steps that I follow, Create a rollback plan: Develop a rollback plan as part of your deployment process, including steps to revert to a previous version, and ensure that all team members are aware of it. • Use automated tools: Utilize automated tools, such as CI/CD pipelines, to streamline the rollback process and minimize manual errors. • Test the rollback: Before rolling back to a previous version, test the process in a staging environment to ensure that it works as expected and doesn't introduce new issues. • Monitor and analyze: After the rollback, monitor the application's performance and analyze the root cause • Document the process: Document the rollback process, including the steps taken and the outcome.
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Situation: First, I will assess the situation to quickly determine what went wrong. Then, I will inform the stakeholders about the issue and assure them that we are working on a fix. Rollback: We always maintain version control to revert to a previous stable version. We have a backup of the DB taken before deployment, allowing us to restore it to the last stable version. After performing the rollback, I will check the stability to ensure everything is functioning correctly. Root Cause Analysis: I will analyze the issue to understand what caused the failure and attempt to reproduce it in a lower environment to apply a permanent fix. The issue will be documented for future reference. Finally, I will notify stakeholders about the fix.
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In case of a catastrophic failure of web app, I would leverage Deployment strategies of using deployment slots or canary or Blue/ Green. Deployment slots/ Blue green deployments allows to quickly switch the traffic to the previous version in case of an issue. While Canary deployment is cheaper than blue - green deployments, and allows organisations to incrementally rollout the service starting with 5% traffic and upon confirming stability and performance to increase incrementally to 10%-25%-50% and then 100%.
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For a successful rollback ensure data integrity, especially if the update include database changes. You need a solid plan to reverse database updates without causing data issues. Having database backups and version control ensures you can restore the data to its previous state, avoiding any loss or errors.
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We will swiftly activate our thoroughly tested rollback protocols to restore the last stable version of the application. Our priority is to ensure minimal disruption to user experience by executing this process efficiently, while closely monitoring system performance to guarantee stability.
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Start with good observability. You need good alerting to know something went wrong, and comprehensive logs go diagnose the issue. Have good runbooks so the on-call team can take appropriate action. Have an individual be the incident responder, who informs stakeholders of the incident and gives regular updates. They also create a timeline of the incident to document steps taken After the incident, you should have a post-mortem. The goal of this is to identify the root cause and implement mitigations to avoid it happening again. As part of this, you should adopt a blameless culture. This gives team members safety to honestly report issues without fear of repercussions. The post mortem should focus on the issue, not the individuals involved.
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Based on my recent learnings, AWS AppConfig can be a great option for handling rollback procedures in case of a web app update failure as it provides feature flag deployment. App config feature flag allows you to enable or disable features in your application without deploying new code. This means you can control the visibility and behaviour of features dynamically in case of any catastrophic failure
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