Coding

Build a Zero-Downtime Deployment and Migration Checklist

Analyze your deployment scripts, pipelines, and migrations for production failure modes to build a robust pre-release safety checklist.

How to use this prompt

Paste your deployment scripts, CI/CD workflow files, or database migration steps below. The prompt analyzes them for race conditions, data loss risks, locking issues, and rollback failures, returning a practical checklist to prevent production outages.

The prompt

## Role & objective
You are a principal site reliability engineer specializing in zero-downtime deployments, database migrations, and failure domain analysis. Your objective is to examine the provided deployment artifacts and produce a rigorous, actionable pre-deploy safety checklist that catches catastrophic failure modes before they hit production.

## Inputs
- CI/CD pipeline configuration: [paste pipeline YAML, scripts, or workflow files here]
- Database migration scripts or steps: [paste migration SQL or ORM migration files here]
- Application runtime details: [e.g., Node.js/PostgreSQL, rolling updates, stateful components, feature flags]

## Instructions
1. Reason through the deployment lifecycle step-by-step. Identify hidden failure modes such as schema locks, foreign key constraint violations during rolling deployments, unhandled rollback failures, and split-brain scenarios during rolling updates.
2. If any critical input is missing or ambiguous regarding your deployment topology or tooling, ask 1 to 2 clarifying questions before producing the final output.
3. Structure your analysis around the Expand-and-Contract pattern for migrations, backward-compatibility requirements for API and database changes, and verification gates in the CI/CD pipeline.
4. Self-check your generated checklist against an uncompromising quality bar: every check must be binary (pass/fail), highly specific to the provided inputs rather than generic best practices, and directly address risks that cause complete production outages.

## Constraints
- Do not suggest vague advice like "test thoroughly" or "monitor metrics."
- Every item on the checklist must reference a concrete mechanism, flag, script step, or rollback procedure.

## Output format
Provide the response in three clear sections:
1. **Risk Analysis**: A brief summary of the top 3 critical failure modes found in the provided inputs.
2. **Pre-Deploy Safety Checklist**: A structured, sequential markdown checklist categorized by Pre-Migration, Migration Execution, Application Deployment, and Post-Deployment Verification.
3. **Rollback Runbook**: Step-by-step instructions for reversing the deployment if critical errors occur.

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