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What is the difference between blue-green deployment and canary deployment, and how do they apply to .NET applications?

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Answer

Blue-green deployment maintains two identical production environments (blue = current, green = new), routing all traffic to green only after it's fully deployed and verified, enabling instant rollback by switching traffic back to blue if issues arise. Canary deployment instead gradually shifts a small percentage of traffic to the new version, monitoring for errors before progressively increasing that percentage -- reducing blast radius of a bad deployment compared to blue-green's all-at-once cutover, at the cost of more complex traffic-splitting infrastructure.
# Canary deployment via Kubernetes traffic splitting
apiVersion: split.smi-spec.io/v1alpha3
kind: TrafficSplit
spec:
  service: myapp
  backends:
    - service: myapp-v1
      weight: 90
    - service: myapp-v2
      weight: 10  # only 10% of traffic hits the new version initially
Real-world example A payments API uses canary deployment, routing 5% of traffic to a new version for an hour while monitoring error rates and latency, only proceeding to 100% rollout if no anomalies are detected, versus a less risk-averse internal tool that uses simpler blue-green cutover.

Common follow-ups: How do you automate canary rollback based on error rate thresholds?;What infrastructure is needed to support traffic splitting for canary deployments?

Microservices & Distributed Architecture Patterns;Diagnostics & Performance
All 16 CI/CD, Publishing & Deployment questions