What rollback and comms plan should we prepare in case the Google Cloud roll-out causes performance regressions?

Potential change-freeze windows

• Thursday, October 2nd: Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti and coincides with Dussehra.
• Saturday, October 11th - Sunday, October 12th: October 11th is a regional holiday in many states, Saturday and October 12th is a Bank Holiday across all of India for Dussehra.
• Monday, October 20th: Diwali/Deepavali

Rolling out Azure Front Door is great for global traffic management, but it’s also one of those infra switches where a tiny config mistake (routing, caching, TLS, WAF rules) can tank performance. You’ll definitely want a rollback + comms plan in your back pocket.
1. Rollback Strategy

• Blue/Green or Parallel Setup: Keep your old CDN/load balancer (Cloudflare, Akamai, Nginx, ALB, etc.) live in parallel. Roll traffic gradually (say 10%, 25%, 50%) through AFD so rollback = just shift DNS/traffic weights back.
• DNS TTLs: Lower DNS TTLs before rollout (60s–300s) so rollback isn’t stuck waiting for caches to expire.
• Rollback Triggers: Define red lines ahead of time, e.g.
• Latency >2x baseline for 10+ mins
• Error rate >3% sustained
• Regional imbalance (e.g. EU traffic stuck in US PoPs)
• If any of these hit → cut back traffic immediately.
• Config Snapshots: Export AFD routing/WAF configs so you can revert specific rule changes without nuking the whole rollout.

2. Comms Plan

• Internal:
• War room Slack/Teams channel with SRE + NetOps + Support.
• Shared live dashboards (AFD metrics in Azure Monitor + your own APM like Datadog/NewRelic).
• One person designated as rollback decision owner so you’re not debating in the middle of downtime.
• Customers:
• If rollback is fast, most won’t notice.
• If impact is visible (timeouts, slower load times), push a status page update: We experienced performance issues due to a new routing layer. Rollback complete, systems stable.
• Support macros ready: Some requests were slower due to new network configuration. The issue is resolved, please retry.
• Stakeholders/Execs: One-liner updates like: Front Door rollout paused due to perf regressions. Legacy routing restored. No data loss.

3. Post-Rollback Cleanup

• Reconcile logs to make sure no traffic got blackholed.
• Collect perf data from AFD vs old infra to isolate the regression (was it a caching miss, WAF overhead, or rule misconfig?).
• Try again with a smaller canary rollout once the fix is verified.

To safely roll out September updates on Google Cloud without risking peak-hour outages, you should use canary or blue-green deployments during off-peak hours, set maintenance windows, monitor performance, and enable rollback mechanisms to minimize risk.

The safest way to roll out updates on Azure Front Door without risking peak-hour outages is to use a canary deployment strategy by leveraging the weighted routing capabilities of your origin groups. This approach allows you to direct a small percentage of live traffic to the updated backend while monitoring its performance. If any issues are detected, traffic can be instantly reverted to the stable version with minimal user impact.

The main name for Microsoft's cloud computing platform and suite of services is Microsoft Azure. The broader term Microsoft Cloud encompasses all cloud offerings from Microsoft, including Azure and other products.