Use when a release candidate is ready and the team must choose the safest rollout pattern, verification checkpoints, and rollback path for the current risk, blast radius, and operational constraints.
Decide how the release reaches production, how it is verified, and how it is reversed if reality disagrees with the plan.
CI/CD automates the path to deployment; deployment strategy decides how much risk to take on each step of that path. It selects the rollout pattern that matches the change's blast radius, reversibility, and operational visibility.
Use this skill when "deploy" is no longer a binary action. The questions are: canary or blue-green, full rollout or staged activation, what to verify before expanding traffic, and what exact action restores service if the release misbehaves.
Assess user impact, data migration risk, trust-boundary change, reversibility, and observability quality. Decide whether the release is low risk, staged-risk, or high risk.
Match the pattern to the risk:
If the release cannot be observed or rolled back safely, the strategy is wrong.
Specify what must be checked before traffic increases:
Tie each checkpoint to an owner and a stop/continue decision.
Document the exact release sequence, rollback trigger conditions, rollback commands, communication path, and post-deploy observation window. A rollout plan without a concrete rollback path is incomplete.