CANARY VS BLUE-GREEN DEPLOYMENT
Delivering a new version or update of your product to the end user without breaking the production down and without failures is a crucial step. In today’s article, I will talk about two different concepts of deployment strategies: Canary and Blue-Green deployment.
BLUE-GREEN STRATEGY
Blue-Green strategy (also called red-black) is a deployment technique used for releasing a new product’s version with an additional new identical environment (green) as production (blue), the main idea is to switch all traffic into this latter one (green) for testing purposes.
In case of failures during the testing phase, it is easier to switch back to the blue environment.
This strategy helps to minimize downtime during application updates, mitigating risks surrounding downtime and rollback functionality.
CANARY STRATEGY
The Canary deployment strategy is a whole different concept than the blue/green one.
The main idea of this strategy is to release new versions and updates to only a small number of users.
With a canary environment where only a subset of end users are testing the updates, its easier to notice what would go wrong in the new version before releasing it to the entire system.