Blue-green deployment vs smoke testing: Choosing a deployment strategy

The article explores different deployment strategies, focusing on blue-green and smoke test deployments, each with distinct advantages and challenges. Blue-green deployment involves maintaining two identical environments, allowing for zero-downtime deployments and instant rollbacks by switching traffic between them, but it requires double the infrastructure resources, making it costly. It is favored for mission-critical applications where reliability is paramount. Smoke test deployment, on the other hand, offers a more resource-efficient approach by conducting immediate basic functionality tests on new code within existing infrastructure, providing rapid feedback on critical issues, though it risks exposing users to potential problems and lacks comprehensive test coverage. Feature flags enhance both strategies by offering more control over feature rollouts, and canary deployment is also discussed as a gradual rollout strategy that balances risk exposure and resource efficiency.