Delivery and promotion
Continuous delivery vs deployment — environments, approvals, and promoting the same artifact safely.
CD is the path from a green build to something users touch. Ambiguity here creates hero deploys.
Delivery vs deployment
Continuous delivery: main is always releasable; promotion may need a human or change window.
Continuous deployment: green pipeline deploys to production automatically.
Pick explicitly per service risk. Payments and brochure sites need not share the same promotion policy.
Promote artifacts, not branches
Staging runs the same digest you intend for production. “Merge to release branch and rebuild” is a different product.
Environment separation
Config, secrets, and data differ by environment. Wiring does not: same charts/manifests, parameterized values. Snowflake prod-only YAML is where incidents hide.
Approvals with teeth
Manual gates should be rare, timed, and logged — not a rubber stamp that waits for someone on holiday. Prefer automated progressive delivery over theatrical “LGTM” on a Friday evening.
Rollback is part of the design
Know how to revert to the previous digest in minutes. Feature flags help forward-fix; they do not replace the ability to undeploy a bad artifact.