Why Friday Deployments Shouldn't Scare You
The Friday Fear
Every engineering team has the rule: no deployments on Friday. It makes sense when deployments are scary, when a bad release means working the weekend, when rollbacks are manual, when nobody's sure what changed. But the rule is a symptom, not a solution. If you can't deploy on Friday, your deployment pipeline is broken.
What Broken Looks Like
We worked with an enterprise ML platform where every deployment took 2 weeks and required coordination across multiple teams. A deployment on Friday at 4pm? Expect to work the weekend. Team morale was tanking. Engineers were spending more time on deployment logistics than on building features. The problem wasn't the people. It was the process.
GitOps: The Foundation
We rebuilt their CI/CD from scratch with GitOps at the core. Every change goes through a pull request. The pipeline runs automated tests: unit, integration, and smoke tests against a staging environment. If tests pass, the change is automatically deployed to a canary environment that serves 5% of production traffic. No manual steps. No deployment tickets. No war rooms.
Canary Deployments and Instant Rollbacks
The canary deployment runs for 30 minutes while automated checks compare error rates, latency, and key business metrics against the baseline. If anything looks off, the deployment automatically rolls back. No human intervention needed. If the canary is healthy, traffic gradually shifts: 5%, 25%, 50%, 100%. The entire process takes about 45 minutes. The old process took 2 weeks.
Making Deployments Boring
Six months after the new pipeline went live: deploy time dropped from 2 weeks to 45 minutes. Zero weekend incidents. Release velocity increased 4x. The team ships weekly now instead of monthly. And yes, they deploy on Fridays. Because deployments became boring. And boring deployments mean your engineers are focused on what matters: building the product.