Keeping two sets of environments up all the time can get expensive. Fortunately, we have many tools that allow us to bring up and tear down infrastructure on-demand. We can start and stop servers with infrastructure as code (IaC) platforms like Ansible or Terraform. We can simplify releases with containers, or orchestrate deployments using Kubernetes. Surprisingly, when we factor in the flexibility and cost reductions the cloud offers, blue-green deployments are within everyone’s reach.

The cloud abstracts most of the infrastructure away. We can picture deployments as a series of loosely coupled components.