Quick question for you: when updating our app, should we go with blue-green deployments or canary releases? Here’s a rundown to help us decide.

Blue-green deployments mean maintaining two identical production environments. One is active, and the other is a clone where we deploy the new version. If the new version is stable, we switch traffic to it. If issues arise, we can quickly revert to the old environment.

Canary releases, on the other hand, involve gradually rolling out the change to a small percentage of users first, monitoring the performance and stability, and then slowly increasing the rollout percentage as confidence in the release builds.

Both strategies aim to minimize downtime and risk during updates. The choice depends on whether we want the safety net of an immediate rollback (blue-green) or the gradual exposure and risk mitigation of a canary release.

What do you think? Should we go for quick switches or gradual rollouts for our next update?