Choose the right deployment strategy for your workload. Each strategy trades off between speed, safety, cost, and complexity.
Two identical environments with instant traffic switch. Zero-downtime with instant rollback.
Route 1-10% of traffic to the new version, gradually increase if metrics look healthy.
Replace old pods with new pods one at a time. The Kubernetes default deployment strategy.
Kill all old pods, then start all new pods. Simple but causes brief downtime.
Route specific user segments to different versions to measure business impact.
Mirror production traffic to the new version. Responses are discarded. Zero risk to users.
| Feature | Blue-Green | Canary | Rolling | Recreate | A/B Testing | Shadow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Downtime | None | None | None | Brief | None | None |
| Rollback speed | Instant | Fast | Fast | Slow | Fast | Instant |
| Complexity | Medium | High | Low | Low | High | High |
| Resource overhead | 2x | Low-Med | Low | Low | Medium | 2x |
| Real traffic testing | No | Yes | Partial | No | Yes | Yes (mirror) |
| Best for | Finance | SaaS | Microservices | GPU / Legacy | UX experiments | ML models |
In production, teams often combine strategies for the best of both worlds.
Gradual canary validation with instant Blue-Green rollback capability.
Banks and financial services requiring both validation and instant rollback.Zero-risk shadow pre-validation, then small canary for real traffic testing.
ML models and search algorithms where shadow validates correctness first.Technical canary validation first, then A/B testing for business metrics.
E-commerce platforms measuring conversion alongside reliability.Shadow pre-validates, then standard rolling rollout.
CDN and API services that need pre-validation before standard rollout.Zero-downtime externally via Blue-Green, simple Recreate internally per environment.
Legacy monoliths that cannot run mixed versions but need zero external downtime.