🎁 New User? Get 20% off your first purchase with code NEWUSER20 Register Now →
Menu

Categories

DevOps Intermediate

What is Immutable Deployment?

A deployment strategy where new versions replace existing instances entirely rather than updating them in place.

Immutable deployments create entirely new server instances or containers for each release rather than modifying running ones. The old version continues serving traffic until the new version is verified healthy, then traffic switches. This eliminates configuration drift (where servers diverge over time), ensures reproducibility, and makes rollbacks trivial — just route traffic back to the previous version. Technologies like containerization, machine images (AMIs), and Infrastructure as Code enable immutable deployments. The approach aligns with the cattle not pets philosophy of treating servers as disposable and interchangeable.

Related Terms

Health Check
An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.
GitFlow
A branching model for Git that defines a strict workflow with feature, develop, release, hotfix, and main branches.
Jenkins
An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software through configurable CI/CD pipelines.
Feature Flag
A technique that allows enabling or disabling features in production without deploying new code, enabling safe rollouts and A/B testing.
Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
Postmortem
A structured analysis conducted after an incident to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent recurrence — without assigning blame.
 View All DevOps Terms →