How do blue/green deployment and canary releases differ?

Question

Accepted Answer

Blue/green tests the new version before users see it and then switches everyone over; a canary exposes a small share of real users to it first and widens gradually.

Blue/green
Canary

Where the new version is tested
In the idle environment, before switching
Live, on real users

Who gets the new version first
Everyone, at the switch
A small share (1–5%)

Rollback
Switch traffic back to the old environment
Route the canary share back to the old version

Infrastructure need
Two full production environments
A few extra instances next to the stable ones

Main strength
Near-zero downtime, instant rollback
Finds problems staging cannot show, with small impact

The two can be combined: some pipelines deploy to green and then move traffic over in canary-style steps instead of all at once.

	Blue/green	Canary
Where the new version is tested	In the idle environment, before switching	Live, on real users
Who gets the new version first	Everyone, at the switch	A small share (1–5%)
Rollback	Switch traffic back to the old environment	Route the canary share back to the old version
Infrastructure need	Two full production environments	A few extra instances next to the stable ones
Main strength	Near-zero downtime, instant rollback	Finds problems staging cannot show, with small impact