Today we are rolling out a major new feature for all our Rails applications: support for Blue / Green deployments and Canary Releases.
This is the most significant feature we've released since Rolling and Parallel Deployment Strategies were released last year, and we're very excited to help our customers deploy their applications more confidently.
Blue / Green Deployments
Let's say you've developed an exciting new feature for your app but need to check certain aspects of it against production data before rolling it out to all of your users. Blue / Green deployments make this both safe and simple. When you deploy an application using Blue / Green, the existing version of the application will continue to serve traffic, running alongside the new version that you just deployed. Once you are confident about the new code, you can finalize the deployment which will remove the old version and serve everyone the new one.
Blue / Green deployments support two modes: Delayed availability and Immediate availability.
With Delayed Availability, visitors will continue to see the old version until you finalize the deployment.
With Immediate Availability, visitors will see the new version as soon as deployment is finished, but the old version is kept live on the server so that you can roll back instantly if you encounter any bugs or issues.
Learn more about Blue / Green deployments here.
Canary Releases
Another deployment option available to Rails applications is Canary Releases. Canary releases deploy your new code to your servers but only make it visible to a small segment of your visitors. This allows you to monitor any performance issues in your new version and gradually increase the number of the visitors you send to it.
You can finalize the deployment once 100% of your visitors are using the new version.
Learn more about Canary Releases here.
Blue / Green deployments and Canary Releases are two powerful ways to roll out your code with more confidence and improve your application quality of service.
Both of these rollout options are available to all of our customers from today, for free!