The deploy that needed one person who was on holiday

Description and use

Automated a critical deployment step that previously depended on a single engineer, eliminating the person‑dependency and preventing release delays.

Problem

A critical deployment step depended on a single colleague’s personal script, causing a release freeze when he was unavailable.

Outcome

Automated the previously manual CDN cache invalidation and legacy admin panel configuration, eliminating the single-person dependency and preventing future release freezes.

Workflow

• Identify manual step tied to a single person
• Reconstruct script via shell history and video call
• Create service account with scoped token
• Store token in secret store
• Add script to repository
• Update pipeline to invoke script
• Convert legacy admin push to form POST request
• Test and deploy

Evidence

The step was cache invalidation on a CDN, plus a config push to a legacy admin panel that had no API.

Source

Automating it took a day and a half. The credentials became a service account with a scoped token in the secret store rather than a person's login.

Source