Five mistakes teams make with blue-green deployment

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit blue-green deployment.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Running two environments makes rollback instant
• Database changes are what make it complicated
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Practise the rollback before you need it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

A reasonable first step

How to tell if yours is fine

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about blue-green deployment before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Database changes are what make it complicated — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.