We’re on Jenkins/TeamCity, not GitHub Actions. Does this still apply?

Yes. The patterns are portable: automated versioning, SBOM/provenance, protected environments, progressive delivery, and ChatOps. Swap Actions for Jenkins pipelines and use the same gates (e.g., Argo Rollouts and Slack remain unchanged).

Do we need a platform team to pull this off?

No, but you need 1–2 owners who can touch CI, K8s, and Slack apps. We typically land an MVP in two weeks and harden over a quarter. The rest is codifying your existing process, not inventing a new one.

What if we’re not on Kubernetes?

Use the equivalent: LaunchDarkly/Flipt for flags, Spinnaker/Octopus for deployments, or ECS with CodeDeploy blue/green. The key is progressive delivery with automated analysis and one-command rollback.

How do we keep checklists from becoming noisy?

Scope by service and environment. Keep 5–7 high-signal checks (SLO, incidents clear, migrations backwards-compatible). Anything not automatable should be rare and owner-acknowledged with a timeout.

How do we track CFR accurately?

Count any deployment that triggers a rollback, hotfix, or Sev-1/2 within a defined window (we use 24–48h by service risk). Wire ChatOps `/incident` and `/rollback` to emit events, detect `revert` commits, and reconcile in your metrics store.

Release-engineering · Oct 30, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Release Bot We Built So Seattle, Sydney, and Stuttgart Ship Without Stepping on Each Other

Distributed teams don’t need more meetings—they need a release coordinator that enforces checklists, gates risk, and reports CFR, lead time, and MTTR without anyone copy-pasting screenshots into Slack.

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The Release Bot We Built So Seattle, Sydney, and Stuttgart Ship Without Stepping on Each Other

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist