Question 1

What is Preflite?

Accepted Answer

Preflite is a comprehensive pre-deployment safety platform that catches risks before they reach production. It provides automated migration safety checks, test verification, security scanning, and deployment gates for every release.

Question 2

What checks does Preflite perform?

Accepted Answer

Preflite performs migration safety checks (detecting risky patterns like non-concurrent indexes and table rewrites), test verification (ensuring tests pass and coverage meets thresholds), security scanning (catching leaked secrets, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations), and deployment gates (blocking unsafe releases based on check results and severity).

Question 3

When will Preflite launch?

Accepted Answer

Preflite is launching in 2026. You can join the waitlist now for early access and development progress updates.

Question 4

How does Preflite integrate with my workflow?

Accepted Answer

Preflite connects to your GitHub repos, triggers checks on pull requests, gates deployments based on results, and auto-promotes safe changes. It includes automated pipeline integration, risk-based deployment gates, and team collaboration features.

Question 5

What is a pre-deployment checklist?

Accepted Answer

A pre-deployment checklist is a structured list of verification steps that must be completed before code is released to production. It typically covers code quality checks, database migration validation, security scanning, infrastructure readiness, observability setup, and rollback preparedness. Preflite automates this entire checklist as deployment gates.

Question 6

How do I achieve zero downtime deployments?

Accepted Answer

Zero downtime deployments can be achieved using strategies like rolling deployments, blue-green deployments, canary releases, and feature flags. Rolling deployments update instances one at a time. Blue-green deployments maintain two identical environments and switch traffic between them. Canary releases route a small percentage of traffic to the new version before full rollout. Feature flags decouple deployment from release so new code ships without activating new behavior.

Question 7

What is a deployment gate?

Accepted Answer

A deployment gate is an automated checkpoint in a CI/CD pipeline that must pass before code can proceed to the next deployment stage. Gates verify conditions like test coverage thresholds, migration safety, security scan results, rollback plan existence, and environment configuration parity. Unlike manual approval processes, deployment gates run automatically and add seconds to the pipeline while preventing production incidents.

Question 8

How do I safely run database migrations in production?

Accepted Answer

To run database migrations safely in production: separate schema changes from data changes, always write and test rollback scripts, dry-run migrations against production-scale data, use online schema change tools for large tables, batch data backfills instead of single queries, and verify migration order dependencies. The expand-and-contract pattern helps ensure both old and new application versions work during the transition.

Question 9

What is the difference between CI/CD and pre-deployment checks?

Accepted Answer

CI/CD pipelines verify that code compiles, tests pass, and artifacts build correctly. Pre-deployment checks go further by validating deployment safety: checking database migration behavior at production scale, verifying environment configuration parity, scanning for newly disclosed dependency vulnerabilities, testing cross-service compatibility, and confirming rollback readiness. CI/CD tells you the code works. Pre-deployment checks tell you the deployment is safe.

Question 10

How do I build a deployment rollback strategy?

Accepted Answer

An effective deployment rollback strategy includes: tracking exact deployed versions (commit SHA, image tags), keeping previous versions available, automating rollback commands, writing and testing database rollback migrations, using feature flags for instant rollback of user-facing features, and versioning infrastructure changes separately. The decision to roll back vs. fix forward should be made within 10 minutes of an incident.

Question 11

How do I scan for secrets in my codebase?

Accepted Answer

Scan for secrets using a layered approach: pre-commit hooks catch secrets before they enter version control, CI pipeline scanning provides a second line of defense, and pre-deployment scanning catches anything that slipped through. Tools like trufflehog, detect-secrets, and gitleaks detect patterns matching API keys, database passwords, private keys, and tokens across dozens of service providers.

Question 12

Why do deployments fail on Fridays?

Accepted Answer

Friday deployments fail more often due to human factors: engineers are mentally tired, code reviews get rubber-stamped, testing shortcuts happen, and when something breaks late in the day, the people who know the system best are unavailable. Common technical causes include stale feature branches, skipped verification steps, incomplete rollback plans, and missing context on changes. The solution is automated pre-deployment checks that remove human error from the process.

Question 13

What is blue-green deployment?

Accepted Answer

Blue-green deployment is a release strategy that maintains two identical production environments (blue and green). The live environment (blue) serves traffic while the standby (green) is updated and tested. Once verified, traffic switches to green instantly. The key benefits are instant rollback (switch back to blue), full production testing before users see changes, and no version mixing. The tradeoff is double infrastructure cost.

Question 14

What is canary deployment?

Accepted Answer

Canary deployment routes a small percentage (1-5%) of production traffic to a new version while the majority continues on the stable version. If the canary shows healthy metrics (low error rate, acceptable latency), traffic is gradually increased to 25%, 50%, then 100%. If problems appear, all traffic returns to the stable version. This strategy minimizes blast radius and enables data-driven promotion decisions.

Question 15

Is Preflite free?

Accepted Answer

Preflite is currently in development and launching in 2026. You can join the waitlist for free to get early access when it launches. Pricing details will be announced closer to launch.