Introducing an Automated Blue-Green + Canary Deployment Strategy Using Istio and Spinnaker

Devsisters introduced a new deployment strategy that improves upon the existing Kubernetes Rolling Update method to perform frequent game updates safely and efficiently.

The existing method struggled to meet all requirements simultaneously: fast rollback, monitoring and debugging of new servers, server warm-up, and reduced update time. To solve this, they adopted a hybrid approach that combines the fast switchover and rollback advantages of Blue-Green with the gradual verification advantages of Canary.

The introduced deployment pipeline proceeds through the following stages:

• Provision a new server with the same specs as the old server
• Send a small amount of traffic to the new server first
• Gradually increase the traffic ratio after intensive monitoring and debugging
• Terminate the old server once stability is confirmed

Istio was used as the core technology for traffic control. Traffic weights for specific hosts are defined via Virtual Service, and for deployment automation, a Go-based image that manipulates the Virtual Service was built and implemented to run as a Kubernetes Job.