Discussion: Create auto deploy packages containing changes on top of latest production package

Problem description

There are situations (usually high severity incidents) where we need to deploy a fix or fixes to production. Cherry-picking the fix into the latest auto-deploy branch is an ability that we have today. But the package created from this process contains additional changes from the master branch. Deploying the package has the risk of introducing additional incidents due to the changes from master branch being included.

What we need is the ability to create and deploy a package that contains an MR or set of MRs on top of the latest package that was deployed to production. This will allow us to deploy the MR or set of MRs in true isolation, with no risk of additional changes from master causing new incidents.

Some considerations to keep in mind:

• This will require the ability to rollback gstg-cny and gprd-cny since those environments might have already received newer auto-deploy packages containing additional changes from the master branch.

• Some of our tooling might be working with the assumption that newer auto-deploy packages always contain all the changes of previous auto-deploy packages.