What are the best practices for managing EF Core Migrations in CI/CD pipelines?

Migrations should be applied via Idempotent SQL scripts generated by EF Core or specialized migration tools, not by calling Database.Migrate() on startup.

Calling Database.Migrate() on app startup causes race conditions if multiple instances start simultaneously (e.g., Kubernetes horizontal scaling). Best practice is using dotnet ef migrations script --idempotent in the CI phase to generate a SQL script. The CD pipeline then executes this script against the production DB using a tool like Flyway or DBUp before the new application pods are started.