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name: deployment-strategist description: | Guides deployment and release strategy—choosing rollout patterns (rolling, blue-green, canary, feature flags), environment topology, promotion paths, blast-radius control, rollback design, change windows, and cross-team rollout plans for web, API, data, and ML workloads. Use when planning a production release, comparing deployment approaches, writing a rollout or cutover plan, designing multi-region or zero-downtime migrations, coordinating schema changes with deploys, or preparing executive/stakeholder release briefs (for launch messaging and customer comms copy, use communication-lead)—not for multi-team program tracking (technical-program-manager), implementing CI YAML (devops), Terraform/VPC design (infrastructure-engineer), security scan gates (devsecops), or upfront multi-service architecture and ADRs (senior-system-architecture). For Helm/Kustomize apply, cluster upgrades, and in-cluster rollout status, use cluster-deployment-engineer.

Deployment Strategist

When to Use

• Choose a rollout pattern such as canary, blue-green, rolling, shadow, or feature-flagged release
• Write production rollout, cutover, rollback, or recovery plans
• Coordinate deploy strategy for schema changes, migrations, multi-region releases, or high-risk launches
• Define entry/exit criteria, health metrics, and go/no-go checks for phased deployment
• Brief stakeholders on release risk, blast radius, and contingency plans

When NOT to Use

• Implement CI/CD YAML, GitOps sync, or build systems → devops
• Provision VPCs, clusters, networking, or Terraform modules → infrastructure-engineer
• Add pipeline security gates or supply-chain controls → devsecops
• Manage multi-team program milestones and RAID logs → technical-program-manager
• Write cross-service architecture ADRs before implementation → senior-system-architecture

Related skills

Need	Skill
Pipeline implementation, GitOps, on-call	devops
Cloud networking, K8s clusters, IaC	infrastructure-engineer
Release gates, canary metrics for AI products	ai-lead-ops
Secure pipeline and supply chain	devsecops
App feature design and migrations in code	senior-fullstack-developer
Cross-team milestones, RAID, launch council	technical-program-manager
Architecture review before major migration	senior-system-architecture
Launch and customer messaging	communication-lead
K8s deploy execution and cluster ops	cluster-deployment-engineer

Core Workflows

1. Strategy selection

Decision inputs:

Factor	Question
Blast radius	How many users affected if deploy fails?
State	Stateless vs session-sticky vs data migration
Observability	Can you measure canary health in <5 min?
Rollback speed	RTO target (seconds vs hours)
Compliance	Change freeze, audit trail, approval depth

Default recommendations:

Profile	Strategy
Stateless API, good metrics	Canary or rolling + feature flags
Major version, schema change	Blue-green or parallel stack + phased traffic
Mobile / app store	Phased rollout by % users; no instant rollback
ML model + prompt	Shadow → canary → full; version pins
Data warehouse	Expand-contract migrations; backfill before cutover

See references/strategy_selection.md for decision tree and trade-off matrix.

2. Rollout plan document

Produce a plan containing:

1. Objective — what changes, for whom, by when
2. Scope — services, regions, tenants, feature flags
3. Phases — dev → staging → prod canary → prod 100%
4. Entry/exit criteria per phase (metrics, tests, approvals)
5. Rollback — trigger conditions, owner, steps, data implications
6. Comms — internal channels, customer status page if needed
7. Schedule — timezone-aware; avoid peak and freeze windows

See references/rollout_planning.md for template and stakeholder RACI.

3. Environment and promotion design

• Minimum: dev, staging, prod (prod-like staging mandatory for risky changes)
• Optional: preview per PR, perf, disaster-recovery drill env
• Promotion = new artifact digest, not rebuild; same artifact across stages
• Config via environment overlays; secrets from vault

See references/environments_promotion.md for topology patterns and config rules.

4. Database and dependency coordination

Expand-contract pattern for schema:

1. Expand: deploy code tolerant of old and new schema
2. Migrate data
3. Contract: remove old paths in later deploy

Never drop columns or rename in same release as code depends on new shape without dual-write.

See references/strategy_selection.md for coupled release patterns.

5. Rollback and recovery

Rollback type	When
Fast	Redeploy previous artifact digest; flip traffic
Config	Revert feature flag or config map
Data	Restore backup / run down migration (slow, risky)

Define rollback triggers before deploy: error rate, SLO burn, failed smoke, manual abort.

See references/rollback_recovery.md for playbooks and drill cadence.

6. Risk, compliance, and sign-off

• Map change to risk tier (low / medium / high)
• High: CAB or change ticket, maintenance window, extra approvers
• Document blast radius and tested rollback
• Post-deploy verification window with named owner

See references/risk_compliance.md for tier definitions and evidence list.

When to load references

• Choose strategy → references/strategy_selection.md
• Rollout plan template → references/rollout_planning.md
• Environments → references/environments_promotion.md
• Rollback → references/rollback_recovery.md
• Change control → references/risk_compliance.md