One of the challenges with frequent releases and deployments is the downtime while taking stable application build from the one production environment to another environment. You usually need to do this activity very quickly in order to minimize downtime while deploying the test passed build to another production environment. By Using App42 PaaS Blue-Green Deployment technique you can switch between your production environments (switch URLs) at any time without any downtime.

The App42 Blue-Green deployment approach does this by ensuring that you have two identical production environments. At any point of time, let’s say your production environment (blue) is live. Now let’s say if you prepare a new release of your application and you deploy it on your idle production environment (green) and you do the complete testing of that application in the green environment. Once you are satisfied with the new application build and if your application is working perfect in the green environment, you can switch the production live URL to point to the new tested production environment so that all incoming requests now go to the green production environment. The Blue environment or the earlier production environment will now be idle. In case of any issue, you can switch back your app live URL back to blue environment.

Once you have switched your live production URL to point to your tested production environment and if it is stable, then you can use the blue environment as your testing environment for the final testing step for your next release. Again in the next release you can switch from green to blue in the same way that you did from blue to green earlier. In this way both production environments are switched between themselves.