The challenge
Northwind’s platform team ran a two-week release train and a hard freeze every December. A bad deploy meant a rollback, a war room and a weekend.
The approach
They wrapped risky paths in flags, moved every service to percentage rollouts and wrote four rollback rules — latency, errors, checkout conversion and a PII judge for their support agent.
The result
Releases went from weekly to daily. The December freeze was cancelled. The on-call rota stopped dreading Fridays.