What deployment strategies help minimize downtime and risk when releasing a new version of a Next.js application?

Strategies include using rolling deployments that gradually shift traffic to the new version, blue green deployments where a completely separate environment is tested before switching traffic over, and feature flags that let you enable new functionality gradually without a full redeploy, all of which reduce the risk of a bad release affecting all users at once.

// Feature flag example, using an environment variable
const showNewCheckout = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_NEW_CHECKOUT === 'true';