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Which DevOps deployment strategies work best for different scenarios?
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We're evaluating different DevOps deployment strategies and I'm curious about real-world experiences. When do you use blue-green vs canary vs rolling deployments?
What factors influence your choice? Is it about risk tolerance, team size, infrastructure complexity, or something else?
Also, how do you handle database migrations during deployments? That's always been the trickiest part for us, especially with zero-downtime requirements.
For DevOps deployment strategies, we use different approaches based on risk and complexity. Blue-green for high-risk changes where we need instant rollback capability. Canary for gradual rollouts where we want to monitor metrics before full deployment.
Rolling deployments work well for stateless services where instances can be updated one by one without downtime. We use this for most of our microservices.
The biggest factor is your database migration strategy. If you need zero-downtime schema changes, you need to plan your deployment strategy around that. We often do blue-green with the database changes applied to both environments before switching traffic.
We mostly use canary deployments for our DevOps deployment strategies because they give us the most control over risk. We start with 1% of traffic, monitor error rates and performance metrics, then gradually increase if everything looks good.
For database migrations, we use expand/contract pattern. Add new columns or tables alongside old ones, migrate data gradually, update application to use new schema, then remove old columns. This allows zero-downtime migrations even for significant schema changes.
The key is having good monitoring in place before you choose a deployment strategy. If you can't measure the impact of your deployment, you're flying blind regardless of which strategy you use.
Our choice of DevOps deployment strategies depends on the service's criticality. For customer-facing APIs, we use blue-green with automated health checks. For internal tools, rolling deployments are fine. For data processing jobs, we sometimes do shadow deployments where new and old versions run in parallel.
For database migrations, we've had success with tools like Flyway and Liquibase that manage versioning and rollbacks. The important part is testing migrations on production-like data before running them for real.
Also, consider your team size. Blue-green requires more infrastructure, which might be fine for a large team but overwhelming for a small one. Start simple and add complexity as you need it.
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