How do you choose between rolling, blue-green, and canary deployment for a production API?

Choose rolling, blue-green, or canary deployment

Chooses a deployment strategy from capacity, compatibility, risk, observability, and rollback needs, then defines progressive promotion and abort signals.

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TL;DR

A rolling deployment replaces instances in batches and uses less duplicate capacity, but old and new versions overlap. Blue-green keeps two complete environments and switches traffic after validating the new one, which makes cutover and fallback fast at higher cost. A canary sends a small share of production traffic to the new version, observes it, and expands exposure in stages. I would choose based on change risk, traffic-routing capability, spare capacity, session behavior, and whether both application versions can safely use the same data and dependencies.

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Deployment strategy, traffic shifting, capacity, compatibility, health signals, automated promotion, rollback, data changes, and cost.

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Why this question matters
The strategies reduce release risk in different ways. A useful choice accounts for infrastructure capacity, version overlap, traffic control, state changes, and how quickly the team can detect a bad release.
A rolling deployment replaces instances in batches and uses less duplicate capacity, but old and new versions overlap. Blue-green keeps two complete environments and switches traffic after validating the new one, which makes cutover and fallback fast at higher cost. A canary sends a small share of production traffic to the new version, observes it, and expands exposure in stages. I would choose based on change risk, traffic-routing capability, spare capacity, session behavior, and whether both application versions can safely use the same data and dependencies.
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Whichever strategy I use, promotion needs explicit health gates such as error rate, latency, saturation, business failures, and critical-flow checks. Database and event changes remain backward compatible while versions overlap, often through expand and contract. Sticky sessions, background consumers, scheduled jobs, and caches need separate treatment because traffic weights do not control all work. Feature flags can separate code deployment from user exposure, but they do not replace infrastructure health or cleanup.

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Details

Choosing blue-green and forgetting the cost of two production-capable environments.
Calling a deployment canary without controlling or measuring its traffic cohort.
Ignoring old and new version compatibility during a rolling release.
Using infrastructure success as the only promotion signal.

How do you choose between rolling, blue-green, and canary deployment for a production API?

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