What is Blue-Green Deployment?
A release strategy using two identical environments to achieve zero-downtime deploys.
Blue-Green Deployment maintains two identical production environments: Blue (current live) and Green (new version). Traffic is switched from Blue to Green instantly after Green is validated. If Green has issues, you rollback instantly by switching traffic back to Blue. This eliminates downtime during deployments and makes rollbacks trivial. The tradeoff is the cost of running duplicate infrastructure. Flagger automates this pattern in Kubernetes.
Related Terms
More CI/CD Terms
Canary Deployment
Gradually rolling out a new version to a small percentage of users before full release.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery — automating build, test, and deploy pipelines.
Feature Flag
A configuration mechanism to enable or disable features without redeploying code.
Flagger
A Kubernetes operator automating canary deployments, A/B tests, and blue-green releases.
GitHub Actions
GitHub's built-in CI/CD platform for automating workflows triggered by repository events.
GitLab CI
GitLab's integrated CI/CD system defined in a .gitlab-ci.yml file.
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