Reducing Rollbacks in CI/CD Pipelines

With rollout mechanisms pre-configured in your CI/CD pipelines, you can count on your application being safely restored to its last stable version if anything goes wrong during or after new version rollouts of your app. However, frequent rollbacks often indicate deeper, lingering issues within these pipelines.

A rollback in CI/CD pipelines is a mechanism that reverts an application or service to a previous stable version in case a new deployment causes issues or fails. Rollbacks work as a fail-safe to avoid system downtime and mitigate problems that may arise during or after deployment. They are particularly crucial in environments with a large user base or critical systems.

Rollbacks should not be perceived as failures but rather as an incident recovery mechanism or a safety net to shield end users and preserve system integrity from the impact of inadvertent issues that may arise during or after a new version or feature release of an application.

In the CI/CD pipeline shown below, the build package first undergoes automation testing procedures as specified by the development and QA team. If everything checks out as expected, the rollout continues as usual. 

However, in case of an issue, the automated (or manual) monitoring system triggers an alert for unexpected behavior or test failures, and the rollback mechanism kicks in, thus reverting the system to the last stable release. 

In many cases, rollback mechanisms are also configured if something breaks or goes haywire after deployment, such as:

• Application Crashes — Your application fails to start or crashes soon after deployment.
• Performance Hits — A new release causes increased network latencies, unexpected errors, or resource exhaustion.
• Data Inconsistencies — Changes in the database schema or integration flaws leading to data corruption.
• User Experience Problems — Features break or backward compatibility issues after the new release. 

Also Read: Top 10 Automation Testing Tools

Here are some common scenarios where using CI/CD rollbacks is a preferred way to handle things when something goes wrong with your integration or deployment processes in your apps:

Post-Deployment Issues 

Even if your applications undergo rigorous unit testing, integration testing, or stick to shift-left testing strategies, they may still fail to cover all production scenarios, especially the ones that show up after deployment finishes. Plus, critical testing methods such as load and stress testing, security testing, exploratory testing, and end-to-end testing can only be conducted post-deployment. If issues arise during these tests, things can quickly go south, making CI/CD rollbacks an indispensable mechanism to maintain system stability and avoid downtimes or service disruptions.

Also Read: Unit Testing vs. Integration Testing

Integration Issues

If an application uses multiple third-party services or microservices in its architecture, an update to or a new version release of those services might inadvertently break the API contract with the downstream services. This can disrupt the application when it tries to interact with the new or updated versions of those services. Integration tests sometimes can miss these edge cases. In such situations, rollbacks can come in super handy. 

Also Read: What is API Testing?

Configuration Drifts

Your staging (or pre-production) and production environments should ideally be exact replicas of each other. However, even the slightest of inconsistencies in environment variables, config files, and secrets can force your CI/CD pipelines to perform an immediate rollback. Plus, human errors and manual configuration mistypes or slip-ups further contribute to config-related issues, leading to frequent system reverts.

Third-party Dependency Failures

It’s common for applications to rely on several third-party packages, libraries, APIs, and external dependencies to leverage their features and functions. An issue or a breaking change with these external resources can trickle down to your applications and lead to inadvertent failures. In such cases, CI/CD rollbacks ensure that your application isn’t affected until you update the underlying integration mechanisms or fix issues. 

Also Read: How to Test Third-party SDKs for Performance and Security Risks

A rollback mechanism is indeed a convenient and easy solution in itself. However, too many rollbacks signal that you aren’t catching errors early enough in the process. And this can directly affect the deployment momentum and operational stability. Here’s why:

Disruption of Service

Downtimes or degraded services during rollbacks can disrupt and ultimately erode end-user trust in the application. Since each rollback pushes you to revisit the deployment process, it often feels like forcing urgent firefighting rather than you and your team building new features.

Increased Operational Cost

Frequent rollbacks can be expensive, requiring not just extra computing resources but also the additional time and expertise of your developers and operations team. Plus, manual interventions, emergency reviews, and post-mortem analyses can further delay release cycles.

Brittle Pipelines 

Too many rollbacks also indicate overly complex, fragile, difficult-to-maintain, and less modular CI/CD pipelines. These issues allow undetected bugs (which are difficult to debug) to gradually seep into your application infrastructure and often lead to problems in your pipelines.

Also Read: What’s the Average Cost of A Software Bug?

Signals Underlying Issues 

Frequent rollbacks can also be a result of unidentified loopholes in your quality assurance (QA) procedures, automation and manual testing methods, and deployment strategies.

Let’s drill down on the ways to reduce rollbacks in your CI/CD pipelines:

Shift-left with CI Pipelines

The shift-left approach works with the concept of running the testing activities right off the bat from the earlier development phases. In DevOps, security testing is one of the key methods considered for the shift-left testing processes. This includes automated security tests (such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and Run-Time Application Security Protection (RASP)) with your continuous integration (CI) pipelines.

With shift-left procedures in DevSecOps, the code quality and security are significantly improved. And this can help reduce rollbacks due to security issues in the later phases. Plus, the toolchain complexity is also reduced for the maintenance runs, helping you avoid brittle pipelines.  

Read More: What is Shift-left Testing?

Use Canary and Blue/Green Deployments Strategies

Canary release and blue/green deployment strategies are great ways to test changes gradually and catch potential issues in a low-risk environment. They make the rollback process nearly instantaneous — if a problem appears, you can direct traffic back to the stable environment. The net result is fewer forced rollback operations, and you can handle issues before they affect all users. 

Let’s get a quick overview of each:

Canary Release 

Canary releases enable you to deploy a new product version to a small percentage of your servers or users. For example, you can deploy the new version of an application to 10% of your traffic. Then, monitor its usage and the related issues.  If the new version works well, you can increase the percentage gradually to a larger user group or for all users. However, if an issue crops up, the impact is minimized to only a fraction of users until it's fixed.

Blue/Green Deployments 

Blue/Green deployments work with the concept of maintaining two identical production environments. One (blue) serves the current production traffic while the other (green) receives the new changes. Once you verify that the green environment is stable, you can switch traffic from blue to green seamlessly. If you detect a problem, you switch back to the blue environment without downtime.

Use Feature Flags (Also Called Feature Toggles or Switches)

Feature flags allow you to deploy code with new features turned off by default. With them, you can gradually enable the features for subsets of users and monitor performance. Feature flags allow you to test in production without exposing the entire user base to new code that might require a rollback, thus minimizing the risk of affecting everyone if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as intended.

For instance, if you add a new search algorithm to your e-commerce site and include its code behind a feature flag. Initially, the feature remains off for the majority of your users. Then you can turn it on for a small set of users, monitor its behavior, and address any unforeseen issues. If performance issues arise, you simply flip the switch and turn it off until it’s ready for a retest.

Difference between feature flags and canary release

Feature flags and canary might sound similar, but they aren’t the same. Canary releases gradually roll out new updates to a small subset of users to detect and address issues early. Feature flags, on the other hand, let developers quickly switch features on or off in real time without redeploying code. Also, canary releases help reduce deployment risk, while feature flags enable flexible, quick control over feature behavior.

Staging and Pre-Production Environment Parity

Ensure that your staging and pre-production environments are as close to production as possible. This involves mirroring infrastructure configurations, environment variables, secrets management, and even network policies. 

For instance, you can use container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or Docker Compose to achieve environment parity. Plus, make sure to integrate automated testing suites for unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end tests into these environments so that you can validate changes before hitting production. 

Rollback Drills and Game Days

With regular rollback drills and game days (planned simulation exercises to test rollback and recovery processes under controlled failure scenarios) you can intentionally trigger rollbacks within a controlled environment to validate that your recovery scripts and monitoring systems function as designed. 

Also, make sure to include scenarios for both automated and manual rollbacks to test different failure modes, such as service crashes, performance regressions, or data discrepancies. And don’t forget to log detailed metrics during these drills for reference and circle back to them when required. 

Define Clear Rollback Procedures and Automation

Maintain a well-documented, version-controlled rollback procedure that details every step. Use infrastructure-as-code tools and scripted automation to implement these procedures so that they can be executed without manual intervention when an incident is detected. 

Also, consider including automated triggers coupled with monitoring and alerting systems: for instance, if health checks or smoke tests fail, the system should automatically initiate the rollback process. Furthermore, include post-rollback validation tests to ensure that the system returns to a fully functional state.

Keeping Documentation and Change Logs Updated

Store detailed notes on configuration changes, code merges, dependency updates, and environment modifications. Use tools like Git commit messages, integrated changelog generators (e.g., Conventional Commits with semantic versioning), and automated documentation pipelines to ensure that every modification is tracked. This level of documentation not only speeds up debugging and root-cause analysis when issues occur.

Also Read: GitHub vs GitLab: Winner!

Regular Audits and Pipeline Health Checks

Use automated scripts and monitoring dashboards to perform routine checks on build status, test coverage, dependency updates, and environment configurations. Plus, consider integrating static code analysis, dynamic testing tools, and vulnerability scanners as part of your audit process. These reviews help catch stale configurations, outdated dependencies, or misconfigurations before they snowball into production issues. 

Additionally, use robust monitoring solutions, including Application Performance Monitoring (APM), log aggregation, and synthetic monitoring, to proactively detect anomalies that could lead to rollbacks.

Database Rollbacks

It’s important to plan ahead for database rollback scenarios, including schema versioning, database migrations, and regular backups, since DB rollbacks are a more complicated process than application rollbacks.

Error Budgeting and SLOs

To better manage the risk of rollbacks, consider implementing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error budgets to manage the risk of rollbacks better. These tools allow you to measure system reliability and define acceptable levels of failure. Plus, your team can make informed decisions about deployment risks.

RTO and RPO

Rollbacks are a critical part of meeting recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Understanding these metrics helps you plan for how quickly you need to recover from a failure and how much data loss is acceptable.