Should you deploy on a Friday?

There's a common saying about not deploying changes on a Friday to prevent outages or issues before the weekend.

I've also seen this where people won't deploy after a particular time of the day as it's too close to the evening.

When did you last deploy?

The longer it's been since the last deployment, the riskier each deployment is.

If there are weeks or months of changes, it will be risky regardless of which day it is.

If your last deployment was an afternoon, deploying a small change the following morning will be low risk, even on a Thursday and Friday.

Conclusion

If you're nervous about deploying on a Friday, I think you need to aim for smaller and more frequent deployments to minimise the risk.

The issue isn't when you're deploying. You likely need to do so more often.

If there is an issue after a large release, it will take more time to debug or roll back compared to a small release which is easier to find and fix the problem or revert that single change.