The general approach is to do multiple migrations (add first and make new-code work with both, deploy, remove old-code, then delete old-schema) and this is not

The general approach is to do multiple migrations (add first and make new-code work with both, deploy, remove old-code, then delete old-schema) and this is not specific to Django's ORM in any way, the same goes for any database schema deployment. Take a peek at https://medium.com/@pranavdixit20/zero-downtime-migrations-in-django-the-advanced-playbook-742d85f1f5c0 https://medium.com/@pranavdixit20/zero-downtime-migrations-i... for some ideas.