Blue-Green Deployment
Keep two identical production environments—blue (current) and green (next)—flip traffic only after green is healthy.
Think of it like
Having a stunt double ready; if the double is fine, the star walks off stage and the double takes over.
Example
Both blue and green clusters run in parallel; traffic flows to blue; green is tested and validated; flip the load balancer to green; decommission blue.
How it actually works
Zero-downtime deployment with instant rollback. Requires double the infrastructure cost temporarily. Good for large, monolithic systems. Can pair with canary for even lower risk. Requires health checks and smoke tests to validate green before flip.
For product teams
Enables high-confidence, zero-downtime deployments at cost of doubled temporary infrastructure.
For engineers
DNS or load balancer points to blue or green; deployment automation validates green, then flips the selector; blue remains on standby for instant rollback.
Related
- Variant of.
- Pairs well with.
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