Blue-Green Deployments: A Definition and Introductory Guide

Blue-green deployments are an application release strategy that involves creating two identical instances of a production app behind a load balancer, allowing updates to be made without any downtime. This deployment process ensures safety in your releases and enables more frequent and confident deployments. Benefits include reduced downtime, less stress on the engineering team, and increased competency in releasing. However, there are some drawbacks such as complexity in infrastructure and deployments, as well as cost considerations. Feature flags can be used alongside blue-green deployments to provide additional safety at the feature level. Ultimately, choosing a deployment strategy depends on your specific needs and trade-offs.