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by joshuamorton 2719 days ago
At least from what I've seen red/green (I've heard blue/green) or A/B deployments represent a different thing. A blue/green deployment says you have 2 environments, each able to handle all of your traffic. So you have 2x the servers you need running, and move traffic between environments to upgrade. Its double buffering, but with binary versions.

The (traffic) canarying process that Google and Netflix use, and that is described in this article is distinct from that, since you don't need a significant amount of overhead.

1 comments

Huh. Nomenclature. FWIW Ive also never heard of A/B being limited to binary or requiring full N sets of resources. I've only seen it as small subsets of traffic that is ramped up to some confidence interval. Similarly two concurrent variants is the simplest and minimal value. But Ive also seen literally thousands of concurrent variants with enough workload & consumers. Agree on overhead, as it's essentially a version management + stable routing problem you dont/shouldnt increase resource requirements.