Cutover Sundays in Bangkok: a practical checklist

When a Bangkok team schedules a schema cutover, the quiet window is often late Sunday evening. Traffic to consumer apps dips; B2B traffic may still trickle from other regions. Our engagement notes always include a one-page checklist the on-call engineer can print.

1. Confirm the migration scripts and reverse scripts share the same reviewed commit.
2. Freeze non-essential deploys two hours before the window.
3. Capture a fresh slow-query sample before and after the change.
4. Run the smoke queries listed in the handoff, not invent new ones under pressure.
5. Decide in advance who can call a rollback without waiting for a group chat consensus.

We have seen more failed cutovers from unclear ownership than from bad SQL. Write the names beside each step. Then the Sunday window becomes a procedure instead of a negotiation.