Blue Green Deployments vs Rolling Deployments?

deployment blue-green-deployment
n00b picture n00b · Feb 21, 2017 · Viewed 23.5k times · Source

What's the difference between a blue/green deployment and a rolling deployment? I always thought that a blue/green deployment was a sudden switch of traffic from the old version to the new version immediately.

This talk about Blue/Green deployment on AWS shows various different strategies to implement a blue/green deployment, but they also seem to match the definition of a rolling deployment.

Is a blue/green deployment a subset of rolling deployments?

Answer

itaysk picture itaysk · Nov 20, 2017

I have written an essay on this topic here: http://blog.itaysk.com/2017/11/20/deployment-strategies-defined

In my opinion the difference is whether the new version is applied by replacing instances in the existing setup (in the case of rolling upgrade), or a completely isolated setup is created for the new version (in the case of Blue/Green). In my opinion Blue/Green is the safest strategy and is better in most cases for production deployments. Read the post for a detailed comparison.

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