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Deployment Strategy AI

5 min read
DevopsSreCloud Eng

Devops

AI can script a canary. It can't tell you 5% vs 50% traffic for your app. That's a business call.

Sre

Rollback triggers are human-defined. AI optimizes for speed; you optimize for safety.

Deployment Strategy AI

TL;DR

  • AI can generate blue/green, canary, and progressive delivery configs. It's good at the mechanics.
  • What AI can't do: pick the right strategy for your app, set traffic splits, or decide when to abort. That's risk judgment.
  • Use AI for implementation. You own the decision framework: when do we roll back? What's our blast radius?

Deployment strategy is where "it works in staging" meets "we just took down prod." AI can write the scripts. It can't sit in the war room when things go wrong.

What AI Generates Well

  • Infra-as-code for deployment patterns. Terraform for blue/green, Argo Rollouts for canary. AI knows the syntax.
  • Health check and readiness probes. Common patterns, well-documented. AI nails these.
  • Automated rollback configs. "If error rate > X, roll back." AI can wire it up. You define X.
  • Comparison matrices. "Blue/green vs canary for your use case." AI can summarize tradeoffs. Useful for decisions, not substitutes.

What Requires Human Judgment

  • Traffic split. 5% canary? 50%? Depends on your risk tolerance, user volume, and observability. AI has no stake.
  • Rollback triggers. Error rate, latency p99, custom business metrics? AI suggests defaults. You validate against real incidents.
  • Cost. Blue/green doubles compute during deploy. Canary needs traffic splitting infra. AI doesn't optimize for your budget.
  • App-specific quirks. Stateful? Cache invalidation? Database migrations? AI generates generic flows. You add the exceptions.

How to Use AI Here

Use AI to draft deployment configs after you've decided:

  1. Strategy (blue/green, canary, rolling)
  2. Success criteria (what does "healthy" mean?)
  3. Rollback conditions (when do we bail?)

Then prompt: "Create an Argo Rollouts canary for service X. Progressive traffic: 10% → 50% → 100%. Rollback on error rate > 2% or p99 > 500ms. Health check endpoint /ready."

AI fills in the YAML. You defined the policy.

Manual process. Repetitive tasks. Limited scale.

Click "With AI" to see the difference →

Quick Check

What remains human when AI automates more of this role?

Do This Next

  1. Write down your deployment decision tree: For each app/service, what strategy do we use and why? One page. Use it as AI context.
  2. Review one incident where a bad deploy caused issues. What would have prevented it? Add those rules to your AI prompts for future deployment configs.