Deployment Readiness

Assess deployment readiness, analyze environment drift, and make data-driven canary rollout decisions using Harness MCP.

Instructions

Step 1: Establish Scope

Confirm the service, target environment, and deployment type.

Call MCP tool: harness_list
Parameters:
  resource_type: "service"
  org_id: "<organization>"
  project_id: "<project>"

Step 2: Identify the Readiness Task

Determine which assessment the user needs:

1. Deployment Readiness Check – Comprehensive pre-deploy validation with go/no-go
2. Environment Drift Analysis – Differences between source and target environments
3. Canary Rollout Decision – Data-driven promote, pause, or rollback recommendation

Step 3: Run Deployment Readiness Check

Gather from the user:

• Service name and target environment
• Deployment type (rolling, blue-green, canary)
• Change summary (what is being deployed)

Execute readiness checks:

Pipeline Health:

Call MCP tool: harness_list
Parameters:
  resource_type: "execution"
  org_id: "<organization>"
  project_id: "<project>"
  pipeline_id: "<pipeline_identifier>"

• Last N pipeline executions: pass rate and failure patterns
• All required stages passed (build, test, security scan)

Dependency Verification:

• All referenced connectors, secrets, and infrastructure are accessible
• Required approvals are configured for the target environment

Artifact Readiness:

• Container image exists and has passed security scanning
• SBOM is generated and signed (if required)
• Image tag matches the expected version

Environment Health:

• Target environment is not frozen or in maintenance
• No active incidents on the target cluster
• Resource capacity is sufficient for the deployment

Security Gates:

• No critical or high CVEs above threshold
• OPA policies pass for the target environment
• Required compliance attestations are present

Present a structured report with PASS/FAIL/WARNING for each check and a final GO/NO-GO recommendation.

Step 4: Analyze Environment Drift

Gather from the user:

• Service name, source environment, and target environment

Compare environments using harness_get for each:

Call MCP tool: harness_get
Parameters:
  resource_type: "environment"
  resource_id: "<source_env>"
  org_id: "<organization>"
  project_id: "<project>"

Check for drift in:

• Configuration: Environment variables, feature flags, config maps
• Infrastructure: Resource limits, replica counts, node pools
• Secrets: Secret versions and rotation status
• Manifests: Kubernetes manifest differences
• Dependencies: External service versions and endpoints

Classify each difference by risk:

• CRITICAL: Could cause outage (missing secrets, wrong endpoints)
• WARNING: May cause behavioral differences (different resource limits)
• INFO: Cosmetic or expected differences (environment-specific values)

Step 5: Canary Rollout Decision

Gather from the user:

• Service name, canary traffic percentage, and duration
• Canary version vs. baseline version
• Key metrics to evaluate (error rate, latency, throughput)

Analyze canary health:

Call MCP tool: harness_list
Parameters:
  resource_type: "execution"
  org_id: "<organization>"
  project_id: "<project>"

Evaluate:

• Error rate: Canary vs. baseline (threshold: no more than 1.1x baseline)
• Latency: P50, P95, P99 comparison
• Throughput: Requests handled without errors
• Resource usage: CPU and memory vs. baseline
• Business metrics: Conversion rate, transaction success rate

Provide a recommendation:

• PROMOTE – All metrics within thresholds, recommend increasing traffic or full rollout
• HOLD – Some metrics borderline, recommend extending observation window
• ROLLBACK – Metrics degraded beyond thresholds, recommend immediate rollback

Examples

• “Is our payment-service ready to deploy to production?” – Run full readiness check with go/no-go recommendation
• “Compare staging and production environments before deploying” – Analyze configuration, infrastructure, and secret drift
• “Should we promote the canary or roll back?” – Evaluate canary metrics and recommend promote/hold/rollback
• “Run a pre-deploy checklist for the checkout service” – Validate pipeline health, artifacts, security gates, and environment

Performance Notes

• Readiness checks should run against the actual target environment, not a cached state – environments change between checks.
• Environment drift analysis is most valuable right before deployment – running it hours early may miss recent changes.
• Canary decisions need sufficient traffic volume to be statistically meaningful – low-traffic services may need longer observation windows.
• Include business metrics in canary analysis when available – technical metrics alone may miss user-facing issues.

Troubleshooting

Readiness Check Returns False Negatives

• Verify connectors and secrets are accessible from the readiness check runner
• Check that security scan results are available for the specific image tag being deployed
• Ensure environment freeze status is up to date

Drift Analysis Shows Too Many Differences

• Filter out expected differences (environment-specific variables like URLs, credentials)
• Focus on infrastructure and manifest drift first – these are most likely to cause issues
• Use environment overrides in Harness to manage expected per-environment configuration

Canary Metrics Inconclusive

• Increase traffic percentage to get more data points
• Extend the observation window to capture more traffic patterns
• Check that metric collection is working correctly for the canary pods