Deployment
Deployment strategies and release management
Best Practices
Blue-Green Deployment Strategy
Operating two identical production environments to achieve zero-downtime releases and quick rollbacks.
by Continuous Delivery CommunityCanary Releases Best Practice Guide
Progressively rolling out new software to a small subset of users to minimise risk before full release.
by Spinnaker CommunityFeature Flag Best Practices
Operational guidelines for creating, managing, and retiring feature toggles safely.
by LaunchDarklyDeployment Rings
A progressive rollout strategy that releases changes to expanding audience groups, or rings, validating each ring before exposing the next to limit blast radius.
by MicrosoftDark Launching
Deploying new functionality to production in a hidden state and exercising it with real traffic before exposing it to users, to validate behavior and capacity safely.
by Facebook (Meta) EngineeringPatterns
Blue-Green Deployment
Run two identical production environments, switching traffic between them for zero-downtime deployments
Canary Deployment
Gradually roll out changes to a small subset of users before rolling out to the entire infrastructure
Feature Flags
Toggle functionality on or off without deploying new code
Deployment Stamps
Deploy multiple independent copies of a full application stack to scale, isolate tenants, and contain failures.
Tutorials
How to do blue-green deployments on AWS with CodeDeploy
Run zero-downtime blue-green deployments for containers on Amazon ECS using AWS CodeDeploy and a load balancer.
How to deploy Helm charts to Kubernetes from CI
Package an application as a Helm chart and deploy it to Kubernetes from a CI pipeline with per-environment values.
Checklists
Production Go-Live Readiness Checklist
End-to-end verification that a service is ready to serve real users in production, covering scaling, monitoring, security, and rollback.
Release & Deployment Cutover Checklist
Coordinate a controlled cutover from an old release or system to a new one, with sequencing, validation, and an explicit abort path.
Rollback Readiness Checklist
Confirm a service can be reverted to a known-good state quickly and safely, covering artifacts, data, configuration, and traffic.
FAQs
What is the difference between blue-green and canary deployments?
Both are strategies for releasing new versions with minimal risk. In a blue-green deployment you run two identical environments—one live (blue) and one with the new version (green)—then switch all traffic over at once, with instant rollback by switching back. In a canary deployment you release the new version to a small subset of users first, watch metrics, and gradually increase traffic if it stays healthy. Blue-green favors a fast, clean cutover; canary favors incremental risk control and early detection of problems under real load.