The anatomy of a deployment that goes well
A demonstration of the split header — the title and the image share the fold — wrapped around a real checklist.
On this page
This post doubles as a layout demo: hero_split: true in front matter puts
the cover beside the title instead of under it, which is the shape for posts
where the image is a hook rather than a figure.
The checklist itself
A deployment that goes well is boring, and the boredom is manufactured in the week before:
- The validation ran yesterday, not this morning — a validation that just passed is a validation that had no time to rot.
- The permission-set assignment is in the runbook, because deployed and visible are different states.
- The rollback is written down before it is needed, when everyone is calm and nobody needs it.
- Someone who did not build it reads the steps aloud — the step that cannot be read aloud is the step that was never actually written.
The part people skip
Item four. It costs fifteen minutes and it has caught something every single time we have done it, which says less about the checklist and more about how deployment plans get written: by the person who no longer sees the missing step because they have done it by hand forty times.