Question 1

What's the difference between Blue-Green Deployment and Canary Deployment?

Accepted Answer

Blue-green switches all traffic from the old environment (blue) to the new one (green) at once after testing. Canary sends only a small percentage of traffic to the new version first, then gradually increases it if metrics look good. Blue-green is a fast cutover with a simple rollback; canary is a gradual rollout that can reduce blast radius but is more complex to manage.

Question 2

When should I use Blue-Green Deployment?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you need near-zero downtime releases and a quick rollback option, especially for customer-facing services. It works best when you can run two production-like environments, your database changes are backward-compatible (or carefully managed), and you have automated tests and monitoring to validate the green environment before switching traffic.

Question 3

How much does Blue-Green Deployment cost?

Accepted Answer

The main cost driver is running two environments at the same time (compute, storage, and sometimes managed services). You may also pay for load balancers, extra IPs, and CI/CD tooling. Costs can be reduced by keeping the idle environment smaller, using autoscaling, shortening the overlap time, and reusing shared managed services where safe (while still avoiding risky shared state).

Blue-Green Deployment

Definition

Real-World Example

Related Terms

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

Explore More Cloud Computing Terms