Blue-Green Deployment 101: How to Reduce Deployment Risk

Blue-green deployments are an application release strategy that minimizes downtime during updates by creating two identical instances of a production app behind a load balancer. One environment (blue) is live and receives user traffic, while the other (green) receives constant updates from the continuous integration server. Once the green environment is stable, production traffic can be transferred over to it. This process allows for safe rollbacks if needed. Benefits of blue-green deployments include safety in releases, increased release frequency, reduced downtime, and empowered teams. Drawbacks include complexity in infrastructure and deployments, as well as potential cost increases. Feature flags can complement blue-green deployments by providing feature-level safety during rollouts.