During an incident, how would you decide between rollback, roll-forward, a kill switch, or degraded mode?

Choose rollback, roll-forward, or kill switch during incidents

Compares rollback, roll-forward, feature kill switches, scaling, and degraded mode as incident mitigations.

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TL;DR

I would choose based on impact, confidence, and reversibility. Rollback is good when the last version is compatible and the release caused the issue. Roll-forward is better when rollback is unsafe because of migrations, data changes, or external contracts. A kill switch or feature flag is useful when one feature path is bad and the rest of the system can keep serving users.

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Mitigation choice, reversibility, data compatibility, feature flags, user impact, blast radius, and recovery verification.

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Why this question matters
Incident mitigation is about reducing user impact safely. The fastest option is not always the safest option.
I would choose based on impact, confidence, and reversibility. Rollback is good when the last version is compatible and the release caused the issue. Roll-forward is better when rollback is unsafe because of migrations, data changes, or external contracts. A kill switch or feature flag is useful when one feature path is bad and the rest of the system can keep serving users.
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Stronger answer
Optional upgrade with examples, trade-offs, and sharper phrasing.
Degraded mode fits when the product can temporarily skip optional work, serve cached data, delay background processing, or reject expensive actions. Scaling can help when the problem is capacity, but it can make dependency pressure worse if the bottleneck is SQL, Redis, or a provider. I would avoid changing several things at once because that makes recovery harder to attribute.

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Rolling back through incompatible database changes.
Trying several mitigations at once with no timeline.
Scaling out when the bottleneck is an overloaded dependency.
Leaving kill switches undocumented until an incident.

During an incident, how would you decide between rollback, roll-forward, a kill switch, or degraded mode?

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