Make use of guardrail metrics and stop babysitting your releases

Modern CI/CD pipelines have streamlined the process of building, testing, and deploying code, yet many teams still face challenges during the manual and risky rollout phase of a release. This often involves painstakingly monitoring metrics and manually adjusting traffic, which can lead to stress and potential errors. The article discusses the benefits of automating this process through the use of guardrail metrics, which act as automated safety nets by monitoring key health indicators during a release and triggering automatic rollbacks if thresholds are breached. By integrating these guardrails with observability platforms like Datadog, teams can link releases directly to existing metrics, such as error rates and latency, ensuring a more reliable and less labor-intensive rollout process. This approach allows for progressive rollouts that automatically expand or contract based on real-time telemetry data, reducing the risk of incidents and the need for manual oversight. The article encourages teams to evaluate their release processes and consider adopting automated feature management to enhance efficiency and confidence in their software deployment.