8 April 2026
Wave plans that respect release trains
A wave plan that ignores the product release train is a fiction. Teams will protect Friday deploys and abandon your carefully numbered waves the moment a customer demo appears.
In Cloud Migration Advisory engagements we ask for twelve months of freeze windows, major launches, and known audit dates before drawing wave boundaries. Early waves should carry workloads whose owners already tolerate change. Customer-facing systems move only after rehearsal proves the rollback story.
Entry and exit criteria matter more than clever names. “Wave 2 complete” should mean measurable things: traffic drained, DNS updated, monitoring green for an agreed soak period, and the previous environment still available for rollback until the exit gate closes.
If finance wants a faster calendar, shrink scope — do not compress soak time. Hours saved on paper return as incident hours later.