Release Calendar and Change Freeze: OpsDeploy Guardrails

Plan launches around real traffic and real risk. This page gives a simple calendar model, freeze rules, and CI gates so you avoid shipping into peak hours, holidays, audits, or big partner events.

Open these first

Readiness gate: rollout_readiness_gate.md
Canary staging: staged_rollout_canary.md
Blue green cutover: blue_green_switchovers.md
Version locking: version_pinning_and_model_lock.md
Index swap: vector_index_build_and_swap.md
Backpressure and retries: rate_limit_backpressure.md, retry_backoff.md
Rollback and postmortem: rollback_and_fast_recovery.md, postmortem_and_regression_tests.md

When to use

Product launch weeks or marketing spikes.
Seasonal peaks or large customer events.
Compliance audits or billing cycles.
Provider migrations, model swaps, index rebuilds.
Any weekend where on-call depth is thin.

Acceptance targets

All production changes are mapped to a shared release calendar.
Freeze windows are enforced by CI and by flag servers.
Exceptions are logged with owner, scope, rollback lever, and warmup plan.
No changes land inside a hard freeze except emergency fixes with one-step rollback.
After each window, ΔS and coverage match the last pinned baseline on the gold set.

60-second setup

Create a shared calendar for releases and freezes. Use UTC plus region tags in titles.
Define change tiers and who can approve each tier.
Teach CI to read the calendar file and block risky merges during freezes.
Route releases to off-peak windows per region.
Stage region by region with caches warmed and rollback rehearsed.

Change tiers

Tier	Examples	Allowed in hard freeze	Approval and rules
T0 Emergency	security patch, outage fix	Yes	One step rollback ready, pins verified, canary at 5 percent, owner online.
T1 Hotfix low risk	config toggle, flag off, doc text	Case by case	SRE owner plus product owner. No schema changes.
T2 Standard	prompt pack update, small retriever change	No	Requires canary and warmup. Outside freezes only.
T3 Risky	model swap, index rebuild, analyzer change	No	Requires full readiness gate and blue green rehearsal. Outside freezes only.

Freeze types

Hard freeze: no changes except T0.
Soft freeze: T1 with approval, no T2 or T3.
Regional freeze: block only in the affected regions.
Component freeze: limit to a subsystem like index or prompts.
Vendor freeze: third party windows that restrict you.

Calendar schema example

# opsdeploy/release_calendar.yml
windows:
  - id: peak_q4_black_friday
    kind: hard_freeze
    start: "2025-11-27T00:00:00Z"
    end:   "2025-11-30T23:59:59Z"
    regions: ["us-east-1","us-west-2","eu-west-1"]
    scope:   ["llm","retriever","index","billing"]
  - id: apac_peak_sale
    kind: soft_freeze
    start: "2025-09-10T00:00:00Z"
    end:   "2025-09-12T23:59:59Z"
    regions: ["ap-southeast-1","ap-northeast-1"]
    scope:   ["llm","index"]
releases:
  - id: prompt_pack_vNplus1
    tier: T2
    region_plan: ["ap-southeast-1","eu-west-1","us-east-1"]
    owner: "oncall@company"

CI policy to enforce

# opsdeploy/change_freeze_gate.yml
inputs:
  calendar_file: "opsdeploy/release_calendar.yml"
  now_utc: "{{ env.NOW }}"
  region: "{{ env.REGION }}"
  tier: "{{ env.CHANGE_TIER }}"        # T0..T3 from the PR label
checks:
  forbid_when:
    - kind: "hard_freeze_active"
    - kind: "soft_freeze_active_and_tier_in"  # blocks T2,T3
      tiers: ["T2","T3"]
  require:
    - readiness_gate_passed: true
    - rollback_lever_defined: true
decision:
  on_fail: block_merge
  on_pass: allow
artifacts:
  - logs/change_freeze_decision.json

Exception flow for T0 emergency

Confirm the incident page and owner are live.
Verify pins and prepare single pointer rollback.
Warm the cache for the fix and run a short gold set.
Ship canary at 5 percent for ten to fifteen minutes.
If green, complete rollout. If not, rollback and file postmortem.

Observability to log

Window id, region, scope, tier, approver, release id.
Start and end timestamps and whether the gate blocked any merges.
Canary metrics during the window, ΔS, coverage, λ, latency, errors.
Rollback events tied to the release id.

Common pitfalls

Time zones not normalized so releases miss the window.
Client only freezes that servers ignore. Always enforce on the server.
Third party changes during your freeze. Track vendor freezes too.
Quiet pin drift during a soft freeze. Verify pins in logs for each request.

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Release Calendar and Change Freeze: OpsDeploy Guardrails

Open these first

When to use

Acceptance targets

60-second setup

Change tiers

Freeze types

Calendar schema example

CI policy to enforce

Exception flow for T0 emergency

Observability to log

Common pitfalls

🔗 Quick-Start Downloads (60 sec)

🧭 Explore More

10 KiB

Raw Blame History