--- title: What Happens During a Production Deployment? A... description: A walkthrough of every stage in a production deployment pipeline: building code into artifacts, storing versioned artifacts, running database migrations... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/what-happens-during-a-production-deployment-a-behind-the-scenes-guide-bohfmgfyw twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: What Happens During a Production Deployment? A Behind-the-Scenes Guide | daily.dev og:description: A walkthrough of every stage in a production deployment pipeline: building code into artifacts, storing versioned artifacts, running database migrations... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/what-happens-during-a-production-deployment-a-behind-the-scenes-guide-bohfmgfyw og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/BOhfMGfyW.png og:image:alt: What Happens During a Production Deployment? A Behind-the-Scenes Guide og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What Happens During a Production Deployment? A Behind-the-Scenes Guide **[freeCodeCamp](https://daily.dev/sources/freecodecamp)** · 10 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A walkthrough of every stage in a production deployment pipeline: building code into artifacts, storing versioned artifacts, running database migrations safely, health checks, rolling updates, and rollbacks. Each stage is explained with practical detail, including the risks (especially around migrations) and how PaaS platforms handle these steps automatically. The post also covers when it makes sense to own your own pipeline — regulated industries, teams whose product IS deployment infrastructure, or genuinely unusual workloads — and argues that for most product teams, maintaining a custom pipeline is an unjustified cost. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the difference between a readiness check and a liveness check in a deployment? A readiness check asks whether an application is ready to receive traffic, while a liveness check asks whether it is still working or needs to be restarted. An app can be alive but not ready, for example while it is still warming up a cache. Health checks act as gatekeepers, so no traffic reaches a new version until it proves it can handle requests. _Teams weighing managed platforms against self-built health checks can track deployment best practices on daily.dev._ ### How does a rolling update deploy a new version without downtime? A rolling update replaces old application instances with new ones gradually rather than all at once. If four copies of an app are running, the platform starts one new copy, waits for its health checks to pass, shifts a slice of traffic to it, and shuts down one old copy, repeating until only the new version remains, so users never notice the switch. _Engineers comparing rolling updates, blue-green, and canary strategies can follow deployment pattern discussions on daily.dev._ ### Why are database migrations considered the riskiest step in a production deployment? Database migrations are risky because data cannot be swapped back the way code can; a bad code deploy can be replaced, but a migration that corrupts or drops data may have no clean way back. Migrations also create a window where old and new code run against the same schema simultaneously, so the safe pattern adds new columns first, deploys compatible code, then cleans up old columns later. _Anyone planning a risky schema change can compare migration safety patterns discussed on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Production Deployment Checklist: 50\+ Things Senior Backend Engineers Check Before Shipping to Production](https://daily.dev/posts/the-production-deployment-checklist-50-things-senior-backend-engineers-check-before-shipping-to-pr-t8nzjgoik) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Your “Simple Deploy” Turned Into a Week of Infrastructure Work](https://daily.dev/posts/why-your-simple-deploy-turned-into-a-week-of-infrastructure-work-zjw80nfm2) · freeCodeCamp · 5 upvotes · 0 comments - [Deployment strategies: Types, trade-offs, and how to choose](https://daily.dev/posts/deployment-strategies-types-trade-offs-and-how-to-choose-fttyvpaxs) · CircleCI · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Debunking the hotfix pipeline myth](https://daily.dev/posts/debunking-the-hotfix-pipeline-myth-r9f9ln5rx) · OctopusDeploy · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#kubernetes](https://daily.dev/tags/kubernetes), [#cicd](https://daily.dev/tags/cicd) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/what-happens-during-a-production-deployment-a-behind-the-scenes-guide-bohfmgfyw) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"What Happens During a Production Deployment? 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