Release Process

Versioning, deployment gates, rollback triggers, and communication.

Production releases promote tested Beta code through an approval gate. Beta is continuous; Production is deliberate.

Beta → Production flow

Release checklist

Before promoting to Production

All planned features validated on Beta by QA.
No open P1/P2 bugs against the Beta build.
Release notes drafted from merged PR titles.
Code owner and SRE approve in #deployments.
Create version tag on main.
CI deploys to Production and runs health checks.
Engineering monitors metrics for 30 minutes.

Versioning

Calendar versioning: YYYY.MM.patch (e.g., 2026.05.1)

bash

git tag v2026.05.1
git push origin v2026.05.1

CI/CD configuration

yaml

name: Build and Deploy
on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  release:
    types: [published]
jobs:
  verify:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: corepack enable
      - run: pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
      - run: pnpm lint && pnpm typecheck && pnpm test
 
  deploy-beta:
    needs: verify
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: beta
    steps:
      - run: echo "Deploy to Beta"
 
  deploy-prod:
    needs: verify
    if: github.event_name == 'release'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: production
    steps:
      - run: echo "Deploy to Production"

Rollback triggers

Initiate a rollback when:

Error rate exceeds 5% for 5 minutes
P95 latency doubles from baseline
Critical user flow is broken (login, checkout, data access)
Data integrity issue is detected

See Production Rollback for commands.

Environment summary

Environment	When it updates	Approval needed
Alpha	Every PR push	None
Beta	Every merge to `main`	None (CI must pass)
Production	Release tag created	Code owner + SRE

See Environments for full details.