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Deployment Strategies Simulator

Learn deployment strategies like Blue-Green, Canary, Rolling Updates, and Recreate. Visualize how each strategy handles traffic routing, downtime, and rollbacks.

Category: DevOps

Topics covered: deployment, kubernetes, devops, educational, interactive, ci-cd

// simulator

Deployment Strategies Simulator

Learn deployment strategies like Blue-Green, Canary, Rolling Updates, and Recreate. Visualize how each strategy handles traffic routing, downtime, and rollbacks.

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1/4

Initial State

Goal: Play all four strategies to their last step and compare how each moves users from v1 to v2.

Recreate, step 1 of 4: Initial State. All traffic goes to v1

Users
LB
v1 100%
v2
All traffic goes to v1

Recreate

Stop all old pods, then start new ones. Simple but causes downtime.

Pros

  • Simple
  • Clean state
  • Low cost

Cons

  • Downtime
  • No rollback
  • Risky

Understanding Deployment Strategies

What you'll learn

  • How different deployment strategies minimize risk and downtime
  • Trade-offs between deployment speed, safety, and resource cost
  • When to use each strategy based on your application needs
  • How traffic routing changes during deployments
  • The role of feature toggles in modern deployment practices

Deployment strategies compared

  • Recreate: Simple but causes downtime. Terminate all, then deploy all.
  • Rolling Update: Kubernetes default. Gradual replacement, zero downtime.
  • Blue-Green: Two environments, instant switch, instant rollback.
  • Canary: Gradual traffic shift, real-user testing, data-driven rollout.
  • Feature Toggles: Decouple deployment from release, per-user targeting.

Real-world implementations

  • Kubernetes: Native support for Rolling Updates and Recreate via Deployment spec.
  • Argo Rollouts: Advanced Blue-Green and Canary with automated analysis.
  • Istio/Linkerd: Service mesh traffic splitting for Canary deployments.
  • LaunchDarkly/Unleash: Feature flag platforms for toggle-based releases.
  • AWS CodeDeploy: Managed deployment service supporting multiple strategies.

Best practices

  • Always have a rollback plan before deploying to production.
  • Use health checks and readiness probes to verify new versions.
  • Implement proper monitoring and alerting during deployments.
  • Consider database migrations carefully. They often need special handling.
  • Start with smaller blast radius (Canary) for critical services.
  • Clean up feature flags after features are fully rolled out.

Overview

How you release a new version decides how many users a bad release reaches and how fast you can undo it. This simulator plays four common strategies step by step, so you can compare them on the same three-pod application. Recreate stops the old version and then starts the new one, which is simple but causes downtime. A rolling update starts a new pod, waits until it is ready, removes an old one and repeats, so capacity stays up while versions run side by side. Blue-green deploys the new version next to the old one, waits until it is ready and then switches all traffic at once, which makes rollback a single switch back. Canary sends a small share of traffic, 10 percent here, to the new version, observes the metrics, raises it to 50 percent, checks again and only then rolls out fully, so a bad release reaches few users. The trade-offs are cost, speed and risk: blue-green needs double capacity, canary needs good metrics, and recreate needs a maintenance window.

Try this

  1. Step through "Recreate" and note the moment when no version is running.
  2. Compare "Rolling Update" and "Blue-Green" to see when old and new pods serve traffic at the same time.
  3. Step through "Canary" and stop at the 10 percent stage, where you would check metrics before going further.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between blue-green and canary deployments?
Blue-green switches all traffic from the old environment to the new one at once and can switch back instantly. Canary moves traffic gradually, starting with a small share, so problems affect fewer users but the rollout takes longer.
Which deployment strategy does Kubernetes use by default?
RollingUpdate. A Deployment replaces pods gradually, controlled by maxSurge and maxUnavailable. Recreate is the other built-in option; blue-green and canary need extra tooling or manual steps.
When is a recreate deployment acceptable?
When brief downtime is acceptable, or when two versions cannot run at the same time, for example because of an incompatible database migration or a single-writer resource.

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