The Silent Failure of 'Rollback Everything' Culture

When something goes wrong in production, the safest action often seems to be a full rollback or a complete stop of the rollout. This approach is simple to reason about but can cause its own form of damage.

A small hotspot in one region, one subset, or one user segment can trigger a cluster-wide reversal. Healthy traffic is disturbed, caches and connections are flushed, and capacity shifts abruptly. The result can be a larger incident than the original localized problem.

This happens because existing tools lack a way to scope safety actions precisely:

• they act globally rather than locally,
• they lack a clear model of blast radius,
• they treat every change as all-or-nothing.

What is needed is the ability to apply corrections in the right zone and at the right scale, without punishing unrelated parts of the system. Runtime safety should be scoped, not global.

A small hotspot in one region can trigger a cluster-wide reversal. Healthy traffic is disturbed, caches and connections are flushed, and capacity shifts abruptly.

RCP focuses on scoped runtime corrections instead of blunt, system-wide reactions.