Ah, Friday. That magical time in tech when Slack goes quiet… and someone whispers, “Should we just ship it?”
You know how it goes. One last merge. Just a "tiny" patch. What could possibly go wrong before the weekend?
A lot, actually.
This isn’t just a rant about Friday deploys. It’s about what happens when confidence outruns caution—and the mess that follows when automation doesn’t catch what your gut should’ve questioned.
📉 The Payment Pipeline That Went Up in Flames
At CashCorp (not their real name), a team shipped a new payment module late Friday afternoon. The CI/CD pipeline was green. Everyone felt good. One dev even joked, “This’ll be quick.”
It wasn’t.
Minutes after deploy, alerts started flying. 400+ transactions failed almost instantly. Slack turned into a war room. People yelling into Zoom. Chaos.
They hit rollback fast—but that rollback brought back old bugs and left partial states hanging in the database. All this because of a patch… meant to fix a tooltip.
The fix took days. The weekend? Gone. After that, the team scrapped their rollback scripts and rebuilt their testing strategy from scratch. Painful—but necessary.
🫥 The Terraform Typo That Nuked Prod
Fast-forward a few months. Different company, CodeScape Inc. Confident team. Automated infra. Clean Terraform. CI checks green.
One problem: a single typo in a Terraform module. It pointed at the wrong resource.
The deploy passed. No alarms. Git was happy. But then pods started disappearing. Quietly. Services went dark.
Turns out Terraform saw drift and decided to "clean things up." That meant deleting production services. The team spent hours patching things back together while customer tickets flooded in.
After the dust settled, they made a few key changes:
- No more blind
terraform applyon Fridays - Required manual approval for plans
- Added diffing tools to catch surprises
- Moved deploy windows to Thursday mornings
💡 What They Learned
Both teams walked away with the same lesson: CI/CD isn’t a safety net. It’s a mirror. If your process is sloppy, automation just helps you fail faster.
Here’s what they changed:
- Rolled out blue/green and canary deploys with real rollback logic
- Required drift detection and preview diffs before touching infra
- Made Friday deploys rare—and heavily guarded
- Added chaos drills to simulate failure and prep the team
- Turned deploys into team rituals, not solo hero moments
🚨 The Real Takeaway
The rule isn’t “don’t deploy on Fridays.”
The rule is: don’t deploy without thinking.
Because CI/CD won’t save you from typos. Or poor planning. Or that gut feeling you ignored.
In the end, it’s not about code. It’s about trust—between people, tools, and process. And when everything breaks? That’s when real engineering kicks in.
So here’s to the chaos. And to making it through—together.