The build was failing, and the load balancer kept sending traffic to the wrong node. You run git reset, fix the code, deploy again—and nothing changes. The load balancer is still pointing at stale application instances.
A git reset only changes your local repository state. It moves the HEAD to a different commit, rewinds or advances index and working tree, and prepares your code for the next commit. But it does not touch running infrastructure. When you reset and redeploy, the load balancer might still route requests to outdated servers unless you explicitly refresh or rotate them.
This is a common trap: developers assume git reset will cascade into a full environment revert. It won’t. Your repo and your runtime are separate systems. After a git reset, you must trigger build pipelines and redeploy to every node behind the load balancer. Then, verify that the load balancer configuration matches the new state. If your load balancer caches DNS or service discovery results, clear or expire them.
When debugging a bad deploy, isolate the issue. Check that git log shows the right commit after reset. Run git status to confirm no untracked changes are breaking reproducibility. Push the correct commit to remote, then redeploy using your CI/CD tool. Ensure the load balancer health checks are updated so unhealthy nodes get removed from rotation.
If the load balancer supports zero‑downtime updates, drain connections before removing old nodes. If it does not, expect some requests to hit outdated code until the new deployment finishes. Automate the sequence: reset Git to the desired commit, rebuild, redeploy to all nodes, reload the load balancer.
Treat git reset as a developer tool, and the load balancer as an independent system component. Both must be managed in sync to avoid partial rollbacks that break production. Whether you’re recovering from a bad commit or rolling back a feature, the steps are the same: reset the code, redeploy, refresh load balancer targets, validate routing.
See how this works with hoop.dev. Spin up a project, commit, reset, redeploy, and watch your load balancer respond—live—in minutes.