Domain 6 of 6 · Chapter 3 of 6

Release Management

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Included in this chapter:

  • The release lifecycle: pipeline, release, rollout, promotion
  • Change approval and promotion governance
  • Progressive delivery and rollback as pipeline gates
  • Release cadence and exam-pattern recognition

Release-process controls and what each one governs

ControlWhat it governsWhen it firesFailure response
Promotion across targetsMoving one release dev to staging to prodOn promote, after the prior target is healthyStop promoting; the prior target keeps the last good release
requireApproval on a targetHuman sign-off before a rollout to that targetWhen a promotion reaches an approval-gated targetReject the approval; no rollout occurs
Canary with analysisFraction of traffic on the new release plus metric gateEach canary phase (25/50/75) before stableAuto-halt on failed analysis; release stays at the last phase
RollbackRestoring the last successfully deployed releaseOn a bad rollout, manual or after a failed gateNew rollout of the prior known-good release
Feature flagUser exposure of an already-deployed featureFlip independently of the pipelineTurn the flag off; no redeploy needed

Decision tree

What does the scenario ask?match the governance verbauthorizeSign-off before prod?separation of dutieswiden / undoRelease already live?healthy or failingexposeCode deployed, off?deploy vs releaserequireApproval on prodIAM-gated, recordedgoing liveCanary with analysis25/50/75 then stablefailingRollbacklast good releaseFeature flag flipreversible, no redeployAlways: immutable releases make rollback and audit possiblerender once, promote unchanged
Cheat sheet

Cheat sheet

  • Render a release once, then promote the same artifact unchanged
  • Keep the four release nouns straight: pipeline, release, rollout, promotion
  • Gate production promotion with requireApproval, not a manual deploy step
  • Who may approve a release is an IAM grant, not a pipeline flag
  • The pipeline's promotion history is your change-management audit trail
  • A Cloud Deploy canary creates the phases canary-25, canary-50, canary-75, stable
  • Make canary verification a metric gate, not a human watching a dashboard
  • Cloud Deploy has no built-in blue-green strategy, only standard and canary
  • Recover from a bad release by rolling back, not forward-fixing
  • Separate deploying code from releasing a feature with a feature flag
  • A feature flag is a kill switch that needs no redeploy
  • Let the error budget, not the calendar, govern release cadence
  • Enforce only-pipeline-built images reach prod with Binary Authorization
  • Release management governs the process; tool choice is a separate decision
  • Blue-green traffic shifting and instant rollback are a URL-map weightedBackendServices edit
  • Cloud Deploy canary phases need manual advance unless an advanceRolloutRule automation is configured

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Also tested in

References

  1. Cloud Deploy overview
  2. Cloud Build overview
  3. Binary Authorization overview