Q53: What is the difference between blue-green and canary deployments?

Difficulty:MediumTopic:Deployment

Blue-green deployment maintains two production-like environments and shifts traffic from the old version to the new one, making rollback relatively simple but requiring duplicate capacity and compatible state changes. Canary deployment sends a small percentage of traffic to the new version, then expands it if metrics remain healthy. Canary requires good observability and traffic control. Both need backward-compatible database migrations and a clear rollback strategy.

Key Takeaways
  • Blue-green switches environments; canary gradually increases exposure.
  • Safe rollback depends on data and API compatibility, not traffic routing alone.