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Use expedited deployment strategy only for staging

According to the Runway documentation, the recommended deployment strategy configuration is:

  • Staging environment: Use spec.deployment.strategy: "expedited"
  • Production environment: Use regional_rollout or legacy (default)

Why This Matters

  • expedited strategy prioritizes speed over safety by deploying changes rapidly without gradual rollout mechanisms
  • Production environments require controlled, gradual deployments to minimize risk and enable quick rollback if issues arise
  • regional_rollout and legacy strategies provide safer deployment patterns with built-in safeguards for production workloads
  • Staging can use expedited since it's a testing environment where rapid feedback is more valuable than deployment safety

Problem

The expedited strategy is currently being used in production, which contradicts the recommended best practices and increases deployment risk.

Example: This can be observed in the sitespeed deployment job.

Proposed solution

Update production deployments to use either regional_rollout or legacy strategy to align with documented best practices and reduce production deployment risk.

Consideration

In case of emergencies requiring rapid deployment, expedited strategy can still be used in production via CI/CD variable override:

variables:
  RUNWAY_DEPLOYMENT_STRATEGY: "expedited"