Production Deploy Process

The five steps between a merged pull request and traffic in production. The pipeline enforces all of them — this page explains why each exists.

1. 1.Merge to main triggers the canary build.
2. 2.Smoke suite runs against an ephemeral environment.
3. 3.Release captain approves the gradual rollout.
4. 4.Error budgets gate each step: 5% → 50% → 100%.
5. 5.Release note publishes automatically from the changelog.

northctl deploy status --env production --watch