Demo Proposal: Live CD Rollback on a To-Do List App, Comparing Manual vs. Automated Rollback

[nalin431]

Assignment Proposal

Title

Live CD Rollback on a To-Do List App, Comparing Manual vs. Automated Rollback

Names and KTH ID

• Nalin Kundu (nvkundu@kth.se)
• Hossein Ghadirzadeh (ghadirz@kth.se)

Deadline

• Week 3

Category

• Demo

Description

We'll use a small, standalone to-do list app (static frontend + a lightweight API) built specifically for this demo to demonstrate automated rollback mechanics within CD.

Our CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions) will deploy the app to [Render or a similar platform]. Our CI pipeline will then run tests before deployment, so broken code doesn't get merged. But some problems only show up once the change is merged to production (like a bad configuration or a dependency that isn't working). To catch these, an automated health check runs against the live app right after each deployment. During the demo, we'll ship a change that passes our CI gating tests but breaks the app once it's live. The health check catches this on its own, and the pipeline automatically rolls back to the last healthy release, with no manual intervention. We'll walk through the rollback strategy we chose and why we designed it to trigger automatically rather than being triggered by a developer.

Relevance

Rollback is a core DevOps practice: the ability to recover quickly and safely from a bad deployment is what makes frequent, automated releases viable. What we specifically want to highlight is the difference between a rollback a developer has to trigger manually and one the system performs on its own the moment it detects a problem. Running automatically is what actually makes continuous deployment safe to run unattended and at high frequency, which is the core promise of DevOps automation.

[algomaster99]

The idea of rollback is good but I suggest to come up with a better scenario. See comments below.

[algomaster99]

Looks good now! Make sure that "healthcheck" is something which is hard to incorporate into test suites. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for a rollback.