Deployment strategies

How to deploy your application in production is a crucial decision. Depending on your needs, you can choose from several deployment strategies. But ideally, what you want is to deploy your application with zero downtime. This means that your application is always available to users, even when you are deploying new features or fixing bugs.

Blue-green deployment

In a blue-green deployment, you have two identical environments. One is the blue, which contains the current version of your application and it is serving real users. The other is green, which contains the new version deployed. Once validation is completed, you switch the router to point to the green environment and start sending user traffic to the environment. This way, you can deploy your application with zero downtime.

Once the green environment is live, you can keep the blue environment as a backup, or terminate it to save costs.

Canary deployment

In a canary deployment, you deploy a new version of your application to a small group of users. This gives you a live environment where you can monitor and test the new app while minimizing the impact to the user base.

If the canary deployment is successful, you can gradually increase the traffic to the new version until it is fully deployed.

Rolling deployment

In a rolling deployment, you gradually replace instances of the old version of your application with the new version. This continues until all instances are on the new version.

A/B testing

In A/B testing, you deploy two versions of your application to different groups of users. This allows you to compare the performance of the two versions and make data-driven decisions about which version to keep.