Release Pattern — Problem

Pattern: Release
Component: problem.md
Version: 1.1 | Updated: 2026-07-16

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Statement

Shipping a green CI build to 100% of production without digest pinning, progressive exposure, and pre-declared abort criteria produces outages that exceed rollback RTO and destroy trust in the delivery pipeline.

Measurable symptoms

Symptom	How you detect it
Digest drift	Runtime image digest ≠ release record
Big-bang expose	Traffic jumps 0→100% with no canary hold
Soft abort	Thresholds rewritten after alerts fire
Rollback theater	“Rollback” is undocumented or never rehearsed
Flag absence	No kill switch short of redeploy

Root cause

Teams conflate build verification with exposure control. Verification answers “is this artifact acceptable?” Exposure control answers “how much blast radius do we accept right now, and when do we stop?”

Non-goals of this pattern

• Not a substitute for product QA ownership of acceptance tests
• Not an incident process (see hotfix + RCA patterns)
• Not permission to waive security gates casually
• Not required for docs-only changes with no runtime artifact

Related failure modes

See failures.md.