What action should a cloud administrator take to achieve faster rollback and minimal downtime during application deployment?

The most effective action for achieving faster rollback and minimal downtime during application deployment is to utilize a rolling deployment approach. In a rolling deployment, updates are applied gradually to a subset of servers instead of all servers simultaneously. This method allows the administrator to monitor the new version closely as it is rolled out, ensuring that issues can be detected and addressed quickly on a smaller scale before wider deployment.

Should a problem be identified during the rollout, it’s much simpler to rollback the changes for just the affected servers rather than the entire environment, significantly reducing potential downtime and minimizing disruption. Furthermore, because traffic can continue to be directed to the servers running the previous stable version, users experience minimal impact even during the deployment process.

This approach not only enhances the ability to revert to a previous version if issues arise but also optimizes server availability throughout the deployment, making it a preferred strategy for continuous delivery in agile environments.