rollback
termops culture
Returning a system to its previous working state - which is only a plan if it has been tried.
The assumption that breaks it is that a change is reversible. Schema migrations, data written in a new format, consumed messages and issued credentials are not undone by redeploying the old version, and discovering that mid-incident is how a short outage becomes a long one. Mature change records therefore state the rollback explicitly and name what it cannot recover, which turns an unexamined hope into a decision somebody made on purpose.
Also known as: revert