FLOWCHART

Blue-green production deployment pipeline

This blue-green deployment flowchart documents a safe production cutover for a containerized service. It starts from an approved release candidate and makes the gates before and after traffic switching visible: integration tests, critical vulnerability scanning, green smoke tests, change approval, and an error-rate SLO check.

UPDATED 2026-09-23
EXAMPLEBlue-green production deployment pipeline
Make this diagram your own.

Open it in the AI editor with a prompt pre-filled — keep what works, change what doesn't.

CASE ANALYSIS

Scenario

A platform team documents a production release that keeps blue live until the green environment has passed automated and human gates.

Key decisions

  • Immutable image: The same built image is scanned and deployed, avoiding a rebuild between validation and production.
  • Critical-CVE gate: A critical vulnerability stops the release before the green environment is changed.
  • Separate green validation: Smoke tests run in green before the load balancer directs production traffic there.
  • SLO health gate: Error-rate monitoring determines whether blue is drained or traffic is immediately restored to it.

When to reuse this

Use this when two production-capable environments sit behind a load balancer. Add your own service-level indicators, approval policy, and database compatibility controls.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What makes this blue-green rather than canary deployment?01
The flow switches the load balancer from blue to green after green validation, rather than gradually exposing percentages of traffic.
When is blue drained?02
Only after green traffic meets the error-rate SLO.
What happens when smoke tests fail?03
The release is stopped and the build is fixed; traffic is not switched to green.
Open this example in the editor →

Tweak it with chat, export PNG/SVG, or fork it for your own use case.