Zero-Downtime Deployments in Distributed Systems
Issue #75: System Design Interview Roadmap
📋 What We'll Cover Today
Core Concepts
Blue-Green, Rolling, and Canary deployment strategies
Load balancer traffic switching mechanisms
State management during service transitions
Production Insights
Netflix's 4,000 daily deployments at scale
Enterprise failure patterns and mitigation strategies
Resource optimization and performance trade-offs
Working demo
Complete multi-strategy deployment environment
Real-time monitoring dashboard
Automated testing and verification tools
When Your Friday Deploy Becomes a Weekend Fire Drill
Picture this: It's 5 PM on Friday, and your team pushes a "simple" configuration update to production. Within minutes, your monitoring dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree. Half your users can't log in, the other half see stale data, and your CEO is texting you directly. What went wrong? Your deployment strategy just learned the hard way that "zero downtime" isn't just about keeping servers running—it's about orchestrating a complex dance of traffic routing, state management, and graceful transitions.
This scenario haunts engineering teams worldwide because traditional deployment approaches were designed for simpler times. When Netflix deploys code 4,000 times per day across thousands of microservices, they're not just pushing code—they're executing a sophisticated choreography that maintains service availability while transforming the entire system beneath active user sessions.