Advanced deployment

Deployment patterns for innovation

Advanced deployment techniques bring structure and clarity to innovation. Mature deployment methodologies create an environment that allows efficient experimentation, feedback, and analysis. And efficient experimentation leads to faster innovation.

You can learn more about advanced deployment patterns by downloading the “Teaching an elephant to dance” e-book.

Blue-green deployments

A blue-green deployment mitigates the risk from rolling out large-scale changes. For production, there are two identical environments (blue and green), but only one is active. The change is rolled out to the idle environment in production. Once that environment is verified, then the router is switched and the traffic is moved to the updated environment.

Canary releases

A canary release is similar to a blue-green deployment, except the initial release only goes to a subset of users within the environment (the titular canaries in the coal mine). As feedback is gathered from the users, that subset can be increased incrementally until all users are eventually switched over.

A/B testing

In A/B testing, a user is presented with one of two different designs. Feedback on both designs are collected, and their success rates are evaluated against the desired metrics.

Once a given design is deemed successful, then it can be released to a larger set of the environment, as with a canary release. Like the other deployment patterns listed here, A/B testing helps you quickly pinpoint what’s working and what’s not—so you can innovate at a rapid pace.

Making deployment patterns possible

Deployment patterns can turn a production environment into an experimentation environment, and they allow teams to be more innovative and more relevant in their designs.

And when you feel you have the culture, processes, and technology in place, it’s time to consider how you’re going to support it all. That’s stage 6: Microservices versus monolithic.