Rollback Rehearsals for Stateful Changes: Practice the Hard Undo

Start with a thirty-second vignette: a payments startup ships a database migration, monitoring looks green, then latency and charge duplicates spike—on-call engineer Sana runs a manual rollback that stretches into hours. This episode reframes rollback as a short, repeatable rehearsal focused on stateful changes (schema tweaks, data migrations, third-party feature flips) that usually fail under stress. Mirko explains the business stakes, the technical pitfalls unique to state, and a compact 30–90 minute Rollback Rehearsal ritual tailored to preserve data integrity. Listeners get a one-page rehearsal template, concrete roles and verification checks, and a measurable pilot target (aim for <=20 minutes time-to-undo with zero customer-visible errors). Episode closes with three starter experiments and a clear pilot challenge: run one micro-rehearsal this week and use the template to report results.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.