Question

An operations team at a financial services company manually executes a 40-step production deployment checklist every two weeks. Deployments frequently run past midnight, and post-deployment incidents are often traced to a step that was skipped or performed out of order under time pressure. Leadership wants to reduce operational toil and improve reliability without immediately re-architecting the applications. As the cloud architect, what should you recommend as the FIRST process improvement?

Accepted Answer

Codify the deployment checklist as an automated pipeline in Cloud Build with defined stages, so each step runs consistently and in the correct order with an auditable record

Answer

Add a second engineer to the deployment shift to double-check each manual step against the checklist before it is executed

Answer

Migrate all applications to Cloud Run so that deployments become fully managed and the checklist is no longer needed

Answer

Move deployments to a weekend maintenance window so engineers are less rushed and less likely to skip steps