Deployment Strategies

Deploying software to production is the final — and most critical — stage of a CI/CD pipeline. The deployment strategy you choose determines how much risk you take, how fast you can roll back, and how users experience changes.

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Why Deployment Strategy Matters

A poor deployment strategy can cause:

• Downtime — users cannot access the application
• Data loss — database migrations gone wrong
• Cascading failures — one bad deploy takes down other services
• Slow recovery — unable to roll back quickly

A good deployment strategy provides:

• Zero or minimal downtime
• Fast rollback capability
• Gradual exposure to catch issues early
• Confidence to deploy frequently

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Common Deployment Strategies

1. Recreate (Big Bang)

Stop the old version, deploy the new version.

v1 ████████████████ STOP
                         START v2 ████████████████
         ↑ Downtime ↑

Aspect	Details
Downtime	Yes — during the switch
Complexity	Very low
Rollback	Redeploy old version
Cost	Lowest
Use case	Development environments, non-critical services

2. Rolling Update