Rolling Deployment
Gradually replacing old instances with new ones, a few at a time. No downtime, but both versions run simultaneously during the rollout.
What is Rolling Deployment?
Gradually replacing old instances with new ones, a few at a time. No downtime, but both versions run simultaneously during the rollout.
Rolling Deployment is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the DevOps & CI/CD area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Rolling Deployment" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Blue-Green Deployment
A deployment strategy using two identical environments. Traffic switches from blue (current) to green (new) instantly, with easy rollback.
Canary Deployment
Rolling out a new version to a small percentage of users first, then gradually increasing. Like sending a canary into a coal mine to test for danger.
Kubernetes Deployment
A K8s resource that manages rolling updates and rollbacks for a set of pods. You declare the desired state and K8s converges to it.