What to ask your agency about blue-green deployment
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on blue-green deployment, these questions are worth asking early.
Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Running two environments makes rollback instant. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Practise the rollback before you need it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What this looks like day to day
The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. 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
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.