Do devs spend significant time on application rolling updates and rollbacks?

Here’s why

The management of complex applications come with an overhead and providing a standard way to deploy, manage and scale becomes crucial for modern cloud-native environments. Below are a few things to consider before rolling out new versions of application code:

1. Updates

Manage updates across multiple instances or servers might become more complex and error-prone.

2. Availability

Modern applications are expected to be always available, with no downtime.

3. Storage

Many applications maintain client sessions, cached data, connections to backends, etc. that have state that needs to be handled.

4. Traffic

Traffic needs to be slowly shifted from the old version to the new version through various orchestration techniques.

5. QA

Every update needs rigorous testing and validation before releasing.


This increases complexity that stems from the need to carefully choreograph rolling out new application versions to customers without introducing any bugs, errors, or downtime which is why companies resort to investing heavily in DevOps and SRE’s to streamline and automate updates.