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  "description": "Blue-Green Deployment is a release strategy that maintains two identical production environments and switches all traffic from one to the other when a new version is ready. The currently live environment is \"blue\"; the new version is staged in \"green\"; when green is verified, a single traffic switch makes green live and blue idle (and available as instant rollback).\n\n\nHow it works\n\nTwo complete environments run side-by-side. New versions deploy to the inactive one (green) while traffic continues",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/blue-green-deployment-zero-downtime/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T18:25:37.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "CI/CD",
    "Canary Deployment",
    "Feature Flag",
    "GitOps",
    "Kubernetes"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Blue-Green Deployment** is a release strategy that maintains two identical production environments and switches all traffic from one to the other when a new version is ready. The currently live environment is \"blue\"; the new version is staged in \"green\"; when green is verified, a single traffic switch makes green live and blue idle (and available as instant rollback).\n\n## How it works\n\nTwo complete environments run side-by-side. New versions deploy to the inactive one (green) while traffic continues to flow to the active one (blue). After smoke tests and warm-up on green, a load balancer or DNS change cuts traffic over. Rollback is symmetric: flip back to blue.\n\n## When it fits\n\n  * Stateless services where two parallel environments are affordable\n  * Releases that need fast, atomic rollback\n  * Cases where mixed-version traffic during a rollout is unacceptable (incompatible schema changes, breaking protocol updates)\n\n\n\n## Tradeoffs vs canary\n\n  * **Blue-green.** Atomic switch, simple to reason about, doubles infrastructure cost during transitions, no gradual exposure.\n  * **Canary.** Gradual rollout, smaller blast radius, more complex traffic shaping, mixed-version state during rollout.\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nCI/CD, Canary Deployment, Feature Flag, GitOps, Kubernetes.",
  "title": "Blue-Green Deployment",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:14:56.628Z"
}