Last week I told you I went to an event organized by the new HP, HP Enterprise. At the roundtable, one participant asked a question about rollback or revert.
The answer was a bit of a surprise to me. Mostly because we get this question often and you can hear in the question that in their opinion, you can’t do that. Why? Because it is not just a question of reverting the code, but what, amongst others, about database updates that happened?
Even when you tell the audience, yes we can, they are always skeptical. The answer you can do it, comforts them, but they still have doubts and don’t believe, when it happens, all will go well.
And of course you need to have defined and implemented your rollback action.
The HP answer was surprising, but simple: keep on walking and don’t look back! By using DEVOPS techniques and by having small iterations the impact of a change or changes are limited. When it happens it is much more efficient to fix the bug and to deploy the bug fix than putting a whole roll back procedure in place.
I’d love to hear your opinion on this!
About the author
Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.
Do you have any questions about this post? Just ask me!