Things to remember before building your first blue/green deployment in Kubernetes

Blue/green deployment is a popular strategy for rolling out new versions of software with minimal downtime. It involves running two identical production environments, one blue and one green. The new version is deployed to the green environment, and then traffic is gradually switched over from the blue environment to the green environment. Once all traffic is flowing to the green environment, the blue environment can be taken down.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that makes it easy to deploy and manage blue/green deployments. However, there are a few things you need to keep in mind before building your first blue/green deployment in Kubernetes.

Choose the right blue/green deployment strategy

There are two main blue/green deployment strategies:

1. Manual blue/green deployment: This is the simplest strategy, but it requires manual intervention to switch traffic from the blue environment to the green environment.

2. Automated blue/green deployment: This strategy uses Kubernetes features such as Ingress controllers and Deployments to automate the traffic switching process.

Design your Kubernetes environment for blue/green deployments

When designing your Kubernetes environment for blue/green deployments, you need to consider the following:

1. How will you expose your blue and green environments to the outside world? You can use a load balancer or an Ingress controller to expose your blue and green environments to the outside world.

2. How will you route traffic to your blue and green environments? You can use a service to route traffic to your blue and green environments.

3. How will you switch traffic from the blue environment to the green environment? You can use a Kubernetes Ingress controller or a service to switch traffic from the blue environment to the green environment.

Test your blue/green deployment

Before deploying your blue/green deployment to production, you need to test it thoroughly. You should test the following:

1. Can you successfully deploy the new version to the green environment?

2. Can you successfully switch traffic from the blue environment to the green environment?

3. Can you successfully roll back to the blue environment if there is a problem with the new version?

Monitor your blue/green deployment

Once you have deployed your blue/green deployment to production, you need to monitor it carefully. You should monitor the following:

1. The health of the blue and green environments

2. The traffic flow between the blue and green environments

3. The performance of the new version

Automate your blue/green deployment process

Once you have a good understanding of how blue/green deployments work in Kubernetes, you can start to automate your blue/green deployment process. This will make it easier and faster to deploy new versions of your software.

Here are some additional tips for building blue/green deployments in Kubernetes:

1. Use Kubernetes labels and selectors to identify your blue and green environments. This will make it easier to manage your deployments.

2. Use Kubernetes Deployments to manage your blue and green environments. Deployments make it easy to scale your environments up and down.

3. Use Kubernetes Ingress controllers to route traffic to your blue and green environments. Ingress controllers make it easy to configure complex routing rules.

4. Use Kubernetes services to expose your blue and green environments to the outside world. Services make it easy to load balance traffic across your environments.

Conclusion

Blue/green deployments are a great way to roll out new versions of software with minimal downtime. Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and manage blue/green deployments. By following the tips above, you can build a reliable and scalable blue/green deployment pipeline in Kubernetes.

If you’re interested in implementing blue/green deployment or are looking for a more complete deployment pipeline solution, Prodinit can help.

Written by - Dishant Sethi

Tags

Enjoyed the blog? If so, you'll appreciate collaborating with the minds behind it as well.