Automate Rollbacks First: The Missing Half of Release Engineering

Software engineer Sergey Shinder argues that while most teams invest heavily in automating deployments, they neglect the equally critical process of rolling back to a stable version. Rollbacks typically happen under pressure — during outages, with stakeholders watching — making them far more error-prone than planned deployments. Shinder measures release maturity by a single metric: how many minutes and manual steps stand between a failed release and a restored working version. He recommends treating rollbacks as a one-button automated operation, ensuring database migrations are backward-compatible, and using feature flags to disable broken behaviour without a full rollback. His core principle is that a resilient release system is not one that never ships bugs, but one that can recover from them in thirty seconds rather than an hour of panic.