Canary vs. Blue Green Deployment: Which is the Perfect Deployment Strategy for You?

In the quick-paced digital world of today, businesses must be able to update their software and services without affecting their users’ experience or causing downtime for themselves. Any organization that uses digital infrastructure must overcome the difficult challenge of deploying new features, fixes, or updates while maintaining high availability. This is where effective deployment strategies such as canary and blue green deployment come into play. If you’ve ever been uncertain about the best deployment strategy to use and have done a lot of research on Canary vs. Blue Green deployment. You’re at the right place! This article will examine the blue green, and canary deployment strategies, two popular deployment methods that can almost completely eliminate downtime.

Canary and Blue Green Deployments: Rolling Out Without Impacting Availability

Deploying with zero downtime, also known as zero-downtime deployment, is an end result which you achieve with canary and blue green deployment. With zero- downtime deployment, businesses can modify their systems without affecting customer service or causing downtime, ensuring their clients can use their services as usual. 

Deploying without affecting availability has proven to be critical for preserving business continuity and customer satisfaction in this era of constantly growing demand for seamless digital experiences.

What is Canary Deployment?

Canary deployment is a technique for controlling and easing the release of new software features or updates. If you are a software developer, you might want to distribute a new version of your application to your users. 

The canary group is a small subset of users or servers to which you can release the new version before releasing it to everyone else. In a real-world setting, but with a constrained number of users or servers, you can use this to test the new version. Before distributing the latest version to all users, you can swiftly find and fix any problems that might arise in this small user group. 

Canary deployment guarantees a smoother transition for your system and lowers the risk of unanticipated bugs or downtime.

Pros and Cons of Canary

Pros	Cons
You can test the changes in production with actual users.	You might get habituated to testing in production directly, which is not a recommendable practice.
Rollbacks are much faster because you deployed to only a small subset of users.	You may encounter complexities in architecting a canary deployment.
If the newly deployed version of the code has bugs, it would only affect a limited set of requests.	You must set up parallel monitoring and observability, which is essential in a canary setup. You should perform a side-by-side comparison of vitals, CPU RAM, response times, error rates, and exceptions.
You can achieve zero downtime deployments.
You can deploy even when you are unsure about the new changes or fixes.

What is Blue Green Deployment? 

Another software deployment strategy that enables you to roll out new code updates with little user disruption or downtime is called blue green deployment.

You have two identical environments with blue green deployment: the blue environment and the green environment. The new code updates are deployed to the green environment, which is different from the current production environment called the blue environment. 

You can seamlessly switch traffic from the blue environment to the green one once the updates have been tested and verified there, making the green one the new production environment.

Pros and Cons of Blue Green

Pros	Cons
You can perform rollbacks quickly and easily. Simply make a route change to go back to the previous version.	You should be prepared for double infrastructure costs during deployments.
As there is never a time when no requests can be fulfilled, downtime during deployments can be kept to a minimum.	Stateful applications may experience issues due to cached files and other artifacts stored on instances possibly getting lost during the transition from blue to green and needing to be rebuilt.
Deployments are fast and can be done with just a flip of a switch.	Database migrations can be challenging.
You can schedule deployments during regular working hours.	You may need to ensure compatibility between the front and back end for APIs.
The disaster recovery strategy is straightforward when using this deployment approach.	Putting together a blue green Deployment can take a lot of work and time.
You can easily debug any issues that arise during a release.

Canary Vs. Blue Green: Choosing which strategy suits you the best?

How do you determine which deployment strategy -blue green, or canary- suits your zero-downtime project?

Both strategies are efficient and call for a similar architecture, but each has particular features that make it stand out. Here are a few aspects that will help you choose the best fit for your requirements:

Blue green deployments: 

1. You have the resources to support two full application environments.
2. Your application rarely changes in a way that isn’t backward compatible.
3. With only minor application changes, this approach offers several advantages and lets you create a zero-downtime environment.
4. Can be used in disaster recovery situations or to address performance issues.

Canary deployments:

1. Your application is modular and configuration-driven or your ability to provision resources is constrained.
2. This option reduces your environment’s operating and maintenance costs.
3. The canary deployment also simplifies enabling and disabling features at any time or in response to any set of requirements.

Whichever approach you choose, it’s essential to plan ahead and carefully consider the architecture of your application and environment.

Executing Low-Code Canary and Blue Green Deployments on Ozone

It is a luxury for teams to be able to experiment with both Canary and Blue Green deployments in order to know which works best for them. The result is a trial and error at the cost of downtimes, operational expenses, time spent in coding, and much more. 

The underlying deployment platform plays a crucial role in empowering teams to execute their deployment strategies with absolutely no hiccups. 

A low-code platform like Ozone ships with 100+ pre-defined Tekton task templates, including those for Canary and Blue Green deployments. What does this mean? Well, pretty much everything! No more time spent on coding pipelines, guesstimating infrastructure requirements and performance thanks to better visibility, and most importantly, quickly choosing the right strategy for you without overheads in terms of time, cost, and resources. 

There are customizable task templates available for Canary and Blue Green deployments. All you need to do is drag and drop the relevant task as part of your pipeline and save the pipeline template in the Ozone Pipeline Studio: 

Blue Green deployments on the Ozone Pipeline Studio

Canary deployments on the Ozone Pipeline Studio

This allows you to master Canary and Blue Green deployments without having to deal with coding or tackling deployment failures, as you can associate every CI/CD pipeline on Ozone with an automated rollback pipeline should things go south. 

Regardless of the deployment strategy you decide on, the dependability and effectiveness of your deployment process will also affect how well your updates perform. That is where Ozone steps in. Our deployment strategies are intended to increase uptime, reduce downtime, and guarantee a seamless transition from development to production.

You can be sure that your software updates will be delivered quickly and effectively, without affecting the performance or stability of your systems, thanks to our knowledge and experience in deployment automation. So why not utilize our services right away and enjoy the advantages of reliable, hassle-free software deployment? Call us right away to find out more!