Shipping to production multiple times a day isn't reckless — done right, it's the safest way to build. Here's the pipeline behind it.
Key takeaways
- Frequent, small releases are safer than rare, large ones.
- Automate the whole path to production — no manual steps.
- When rollback is boring, shipping forward stops being scary.
Counter-intuitively, shipping more often is less risky than shipping rarely. Small, frequent releases are easier to test, easier to reason about and trivial to roll back.
Automate the path to production
Every change runs through the same pipeline: build, test, scan, deploy. No manual steps means no forgotten steps.
- Trunk-based development with short-lived branches
- Automated tests as a hard quality gate
- One-click (or no-click) rollback
Make rollback boring
When rolling back is a non-event, shipping forward stops being scary. That's the whole point — confidence comes from a safety net, not from caution.
Ship small, ship often, and make undo trivial.
Frequently asked questions
It's the opposite. Small changes are easy to test and trivial to roll back, so each release carries far less risk than a big quarterly one.
An automated pipeline (build, test, scan, deploy), trunk-based development and a rollback that's so easy it's boring.
Written by Daniel Reyes
Platform Engineer at Zoomcode
