AOL. True devops is about building systems that make this kind of disaster impossible. Or at least very hard.
However, like agile before it, despite the fact that it really means something purposeful and rigorous, the word "devops" has become widely abused to camouflage undisciplined, thoughtless, cowboy behaviour.
A handy way of telling the difference is to ask yourself "what would Devops Borat do?"; if it's something Devops Borat would do, it's the false devops.
I like to think of DevOps as one of those cheap, 3-in-1 printers that you buy thinking that you'll be saving money and desk space.
Then you discover it does a mediocre job of each of those tasks as compared to a dedicated printer, scanner and fax machine. Sure, they'll take up more desk space, but you'll get higher quality results.
Look at this as a handy guide to how not to deploy in one single page. Pretty much any of the things in bold, had they not been done, would have avoided this from happening. Reused flags, letting dead code sit around in production for years, lack of change management, etc, all are signs of something gone horribly wrong.
Also, regardless of if the deploy went good or bad, discuss the aftermath with co-workers. I'd almost guarantee that some of these problems had crept up before, and being able to ask the question of "how can this never happen again" is important, because otherwise, those problems will be forgotten and stumbled over again, in a future, perhaps more critical incident.
