How to speed up the auto-deploy process for urgent merge requests?

How to speed the auto-deploy process for urgent merge requests? #

Specific situations such as mitigating incidents or unblocking the security release, could require for a specific merge request (most likely a revert) to be deployed as quickly as possible. Instead of waiting for a new auto-deploy branch to be created, which could be time-consuming, there are some steps the release manager can follow to speed up the auto-deploy process:

1. Cherry-pick the merge request into the latest auto-deploy branch by adding ~Pick into auto-deploy and the severity::2 or higher labels.
2. Trigger the auto_deploy:pick pipeline schedule.
3. Enable the auto_deploy_tag_latest feature flag.
4. Trigger the auto_deploy:tag pipeline schedule. This will create a coordinated pipeline with the merge request that needs to be deployed.

Once the merge request in the auto-deploy branch has a green pipeline, disable the auto_deploy_tag_latest feature flag, disabling the flag before could lead to tagging an auto-deploy package using an earlier commit than the required merge request.