Rolling back a Tomcat deployment

Shawn Sesna's article explores various rollback strategies for application deployments on Apache Tomcat web servers, particularly using Octopus Deploy. Rollbacks, necessary when bugs infiltrate production code, can be categorized into simple and complex methods. The simple rollback re-executes all steps in the deployment process, allowing for modifications to skip certain steps and block further progression of a faulty release. Complex rollbacks leverage Tomcat's parallel deployments feature, enabling rapid switching between application versions by using version-specific .war files. Key steps include calculating deployment mode, selectively executing deployment steps, and automating release blocking. The article also discusses Tomcat maintenance practices, such as the undeployOldVersions feature and retention policies to manage accumulated application versions. By illustrating these strategies, the article provides a comprehensive guide to managing rollbacks effectively in DevOps environments.