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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.
Infrastructure Drift
The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.
Makefile
A file containing build rules and commands that automates compilation and common project tasks using the make utility.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
The practice of managing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.
Log Aggregation
The process of collecting, centralizing, and indexing log data from multiple sources for unified search and analysis.
Postmortem
A structured analysis conducted after an incident to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent recurrence — without assigning blame.
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