rollbackable

Rollbackable is an adjective describing systems, processes, or changes that can be reverted to a prior, stable state. In software engineering and data management, a rollbackable operation is one for which a mechanism exists to undo the effects if something goes wrong or if a different outcome is required.

Rollbackability relies on preserving state, versioning, and the ability to reapply a known good configuration. Common mechanisms include transactional operations with ACID properties, checkpoints or savepoints, versioned artifacts, and audit logs that enable reconstruction of a previous state.

Within deployment pipelines, rollbackable releases use strategies such as feature flags, blue-green deployments, canary releases, and automated rollback scripts to restore the prior version quickly.

In databases, rollbacks are intrinsic to transactions. In distributed systems, rollbackability requires careful design to avoid data inconsistency, often through idempotent operations, compensating actions, and carefully ordered state changes.

Design considerations include ensuring atomicity of changes, avoiding side effects that cannot be reversed, providing clear rollback paths, testing rollbacks, and maintaining observability.

Limitations include performance overhead, potential data loss if changes are not fully backward compatible, and drift between environments if rollbacks are not synchronized.

Rollbackable is commonly discussed in contexts such as database migrations, software releases, infrastructure as code, and configuration management.