Enterprise Delivery Best Practices
A condensed summary of the 25 most important enterprise delivery practices for Node.js teams - drawn from every page in this section.
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Separate PR and release pipelines: PR proves code; release proves image - Delivery Basics.
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Tag images with git SHA: Never deploy
latestto production. -
Expand-contract migrations: Backward-compatible steps enable rollback - Delivery Basics.
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Migration before API promote: Run
migrate deployin release pipeline gate. -
Document API → worker deploy order: Per service in
docs/deploy-order.md. -
Pause workers on incompatible schema steps: Avoid poison messages.
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Staging mirrors prod pool sizes: Catch pool exhaustion pre-prod.
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Smoke test write + read path:
/health/readyalone is insufficient. -
Feature flags default off: Server-side evaluation - Feature Flags.
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Kill switches in runbooks: Flag off before rollback when path is isolated.
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Sunset flags after 30 days stable: Stale flags are tech debt.
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Canary at 5-10% first: Soak 10+ minutes - Canary & Progressive Delivery.
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Guardrail p95 and event-loop lag: Not just 5xx rate.
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Auto-rollback on failed analysis: Argo Rollouts or equivalent.
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Blue-green keeps warm rollback: Fast swap when canary skipped.
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Annotate Grafana with deploys: Correlate incidents in minutes.
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Track DORA per service: Frequency, lead time, CFR, MTTR - DORA Metrics for Node Teams.
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Tag incidents with deploy SHA: Accurate change failure rate.
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Tie deploy speed to error budget: Freeze features when budget low.
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Release notes include migration + rollback: Support reads Slack #releases.
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CONCURRENTLY indexes on Postgres: Avoid migration locks.
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Retain 10 prod image tags:
rollout undorequires history. -
Worker and API same Node LTS: Runtime skew causes subtle bugs.
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Load test after expand migration: Staging with realistic RPS.
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Game day rollback quarterly: DORA MTTR is a practiced skill.
FAQs
How fast should Node teams deploy?
As fast as migrations and CFR allow. Daily with flags is common; schema weekly is normal.
Do we need Argo Rollouts?
Any canary with metric analysis works: Spinnaker, Flagger, custom ALB weights.
Related
- Delivery Basics - fundamentals
- Feature Flags - progressive exposure
- Canary & Progressive Delivery - safe promote
- DORA Metrics for Node Teams - measurement
- CI/CD Best Practices - pipeline depth
Stack versions: This page was written for Node.js 24.18.0 (Active LTS), npm 10+, TypeScript 5.6+, Express 5, Fastify 5, and NestJS 11.