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Blue/Green vs. Canary vs. Rolling: The Economics of Deployment Strategies

Each deployment strategy has different cost, risk, and speed tradeoffs.

By Richard Ewing·

Strategy Economics

Blue/Green: 2x infrastructure cost during deploy, near-zero downtime, instant rollback. Best for: critical production services.

Canary: 5-10% extra infrastructure, gradual risk exposure, requires monitoring. Best for: high-traffic services where full deploy is risky.

Rolling: Minimal extra infrastructure, some latency during transition, complex rollback. Best for: stateless microservices.

Cost ranking: Rolling < Canary < Blue/Green. Risk ranking: Blue/Green < Canary < Rolling.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.