Updating a production model should never mean downtime or a risky cut-over. Managed online endpoints support a blue-green pattern in which the old and new models run side by side behind one address.
Blue-green rollout
- A managed online endpoint hosts several deployments behind one scoring URI.
- Add the new model as a green deployment with 0% traffic and test it directly.
- Optionally mirror live traffic to it.
- Shift a small share of traffic (for example 90/10) and increase it while the metrics look good.
Rollback
- Roll back with
az ml online-endpoint update --traffic "blue=100 green=0". - The old deployment is still provisioned, so rollback is immediate, with no redeployment.
- Then investigate the green deployment through its logs. Figure 5.1 shows the traffic split and rollback on a single endpoint.
Common trap: A separate staging endpoint, a new registry version, or deleting and redeploying - a staging endpoint gets no production traffic and forces clients to change URLs, a registry version doesn’t route traffic, and deleting and redeploying is slow. Shift traffic between deployments on the same endpoint instead.