Webinar Recap: Blue-Green Deployments with Active/Standby on Lagoon

In our recent webinar, Michael and Ben covered the “blue-green” functionality included in the recent Lagoon releases. We decided to call our implementation Active/Standby to avoid confusion and be more explicit about the action it performs. In it’s simplest terms, Active/Standby performs a live traffic switch between two different environments in Lagoon - the “Standby” environment is already up and running (so no deployment worries or delays), and when the switch is actioned, Lagoon configures the production URL (or URLs) to point to it, instead of the current “Active” environment.

To achieve this, Lagoon provides a second production environment, built from a separate Git branch, and allocates it with an extra URL to ensure that editors and developers can work on the correct branch. Each of these environments are completely separate - they don’t share the database or files with the other, and whilst databases, etc can be synced initially, there is no provision for automatically syncing between the environments.

The webinar explains through a few of the potential use cases - from site upgrades, tricky deployments, time-sensitive releases, and temporary/placeholder sites to adding easy rollback functionality to deployments.  We also cover some of the drawbacks, namely that content and databases aren’t synchronized (although there are application-specific tools that can provide this), and there may be potential confusion for editors in a “dual-production” setup.

For customers interested in understanding more about Active/Standby, please watch the webinar and see Ben running through an example project, switching between environments via the UI and GraphQL, and if you’re ready to take the next step and get it enabled on your project, please reach out.  

If this functionality can fill the missing gap with your current hosting, now may be the time to reach out to us about moving to Lagoon!

You can watch the full webinar recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urq15chLvzQ