News | Halon

What integrated blue-green testing is, and how it benefits your email service – Halon

Written by Oscar Blenner | Mar 27, 2019 11:00:00 PM

Deployment of changes or new features can be challenging, time-consuming and risky. Many service providers don’t have the infrastructure for production testing.

One great way of quickly and safely rolling out changes is blue-green deployment. Halon provides built-in, integrated traffic splitting that we call live staging. It’s a unique method that allows you to try out new code and configuration on a production host for only a selected part of your traffic, selected by random or IP address. This creates two virtual environments. The code editor and tooling makes it easy to test the working copy before you decide to deploy.

The change can be applied to such a small portion of your traffic that the risk you take is extremely limited. This solution enables you to survey if a new function, change or integration is working properly. The tooling makes changes are fully visible, and provides you with instant rollbacks even after deployment.

Live staging means that you don’t have to spend as much time and money on production testing, and you effectively reduce risk which is valuable to both small and large email service providers.