8.6 Manual approval for production — when and why
Continuous Delivery often keeps a human gate before production: a button in Actions/Jenkins, or a change review.
Use a manual gate when:
- Data migrations are risky or hard to reverse.
- Compliance or customer contracts need a recorded approval.
- The team is still learning the system (early badge API labs included).
Skip automatic deployment (not testing!) until smoke checks and rollback are boringly reliable.
| Auto to staging | Manual to prod (common) |
|---|---|
| Fast feedback | Human eyes on release notes |
| Catch integration bugs | Reduce surprise during peak lunch hours |