Rollout Strategy

Rollout Strategy

Overview

Rollout strategy is about managing risk during deployment. Instead of flipping a switch for everyone, you gradually increase exposure, monitoring for problems at each step, with a clear rollback plan if things go wrong. This skill covers feature flags, canary releases, and progressive delivery.

When to Use

• Shipping a feature with significant user impact
• Making infrastructure or architectural changes
• Introducing breaking API changes
• Releasing to users who depend on reliability
• Don't use for: trivial UI changes, content updates, or features behind an opt-in beta already

Instructions

1. Define the Rollout Phases

Phase 0: Internal — Dogfood with your own team

• Goals: Catch obvious bugs, test basic functionality
• Duration: 1-3 days
• Success criteria: No P0 bugs, team can use the feature

Phase 1: Alpha — 5-10% of users, internal only

• Goals: Validate performance, catch edge cases
• Duration: 3-7 days
• Success criteria: Error rate 1% for 5+ minutes
• Support ticket volume triples baseline
• Revenue drop > 5%

Rollback procedure:

1. Disable feature flag [flag-name]
2. Verify: traffic returns to previous version
3. Notify: #oncall channel
4. Document: Root cause in incident doc

Post-rollback:

• Fix the issue
• Re-test on staging
• Re-start rollout from Phase 1

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [uthumany](https://github.com/uthumany)
- **Source:** [uthumany/uthy-legacy-os](https://github.com/uthumany/uthy-legacy-os)
- **License:** MIT
- **Homepage:** https://uthumany.github.io/uthy-legacy-os/

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.