GLOSSARY / Migration & Architecture
Rollback
A pre-planned procedure for reverting to the original environment if a migration cutover fails or introduces unacceptable issues in production.
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Definition
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A Rollback plan defines exactly how to return to the pre-migration environment if a cutover doesn't go as expected, which is a different, and often harder, problem than the migration itself, since data may have already changed in the new environment. A migration without a tested rollback plan isn't actually reversible in practice, whatever the project plan says on paper.
In Practice
If a cutover reveals a critical performance issue an hour after go-live, a tested rollback plan is the difference between a contained incident and a prolonged outage while a fix is improvised.