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Every deployment is a potential incident, and the ability to roll back quickly is as important as the deployment itself. Hellenic Technologies designs deployment systems where rollback to the previous version takes under two minutes and requires no manual database intervention. This is not an accident — it requires deliberate architecture decisions made before deployment day. Versioned releases are the foundation of safe rollbacks. Every deployment produces an immutable, tagged artefact — a Docker image with a specific digest, a Helm chart version, or a binary with a semantic version tag. We never deploy by overwriting a “latest” tag in production. This means the previous version is always available in the registry and can be redeployed by simply changing the image reference in the Kubernetes deployment or rolling back the Helm release. Database migrations are the hardest part of rollbacks. We enforce a strict discipline: all migrations deployed to production must be backward-compatible with the previous application version. This means adding columns before removing them, using nullable columns for new fields, keeping old code paths until the old column is fully unused. When a migration cannot be made backward-compatible, we implement a feature flag to gate the code change independently of the schema change. Rollback strategy services:
  • Immutable release tagging with semantic versioning for all artefacts
  • Kubernetes rollback configuration with revision history limit management
  • Helm release rollback procedures and version pinning
  • Database migration review for backward-compatibility enforcement
  • Feature flag integration for decoupled code and schema deployments
  • Automated rollback triggers based on error rate or latency thresholds
  • Rollback runbooks with decision trees for common failure scenarios
  • Blue/green environment preservation for instant traffic switch rollback
  • Post-deployment smoke tests with automatic rollback on failure
  • Rollback drill exercises to validate procedures before incidents