Progressive Delivery on Kubernetes: Canary, Blue-Green, and the Control Plane You Actually Need
Progressive Delivery on Kubernetes: Canary, Blue-Green, and the Control Plane You Actually Need Canary and blue-green deployments solve different operational problems. This guide shows how to run both on Kubernetes with safer promotion, rollback, and traffic control. TL;DR Progressive delivery on Kubernetes is more than applying a new Deployment manifest and hoping the rollout settles cleanly. Native Deployments handle rolling updates well, but production canary and blue-green strategies need explicit promotion steps, analysis gates, and traffic control. In practice, that usually means adding a rollout controller such as Argo Rollouts or Flagger, wiring it to metrics, and designing rollback paths before release day. If you do that work up front, you reduce blast radius, shorten incident response, and make release behavior much more predictable. Argo Rollouts icon. The updated article covers canary and blue-green strategies, analysis gates, and promotion control. Rolling Updates Are...