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Comment by gouggoug | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what problem the author is solving. I might be misunderstanding something.

The author points out that the issue with Blue/Green/AnyColors deploys is that they need 16 pods per color at all time (which in their case would end up being 128 pods) and 24/48 hours for each connection pool to drain.

But how is using a SHA instead of a COLOR any different? Unless I am missing something, and, if running 128 pods and 24/48 hours of draining is the issue, then using SHA instead of colors is not solving those 2 issues.

You'll still need 16 pods and 24/48 hours per SHA-deploy, and you're actually making it worst by not using fixed colors since you have quite a lot more SHA at your disposition.

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It appears the issue was running pods for deployment colors not in use if they only deploy 1/week, and this solves it because they are cleaning them up regularly. This does nothing for the overhead of needing lots of pods to support a high number of deploys/week.

You could do the same with $Color, just seems to be clearer since people often think of $Color as being static deployment infrastructure, whereas people are used to SHA's pointing to branches that are naturally cleaned up.

The way this Rainbow Deploy works means that if I only deploy once a month, I only have a single "color" running for that whole month, plus couple days of overlap where there are 2. If I have blue/green, I have 2 colors running all month. If I have more fixed colors, even more. The sha thing is just a convenient way of creating "colors" dynamically when we need to do a new deploy, without having to use a meaningless representation like "blue", "green", "taupe", "chartreuse", etc.

I think their problem is that they need to keep old deploys alive for a long time because they have stateful long-running connections. So a blue/green deploy wouldn't work because their blue deploy has to stay around for at least a month after green is deployed. There's no difference between the SHA and COLOR, I think the choice to use a git hash is because it's the logical choice (instead of randomly choosing a color from a list).

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