Naming conventions in blue/green deployment with different environments

Question

In our deployment we have three environments: testing, staging, and production. We recently introduced a blue-green setup so that we now have blue-production, blue-staging, green-production, green-staging and testing.

We now wonder about the naming of these "colors". Intuitively I'd go for blue/green-environment but this is currently in use.

Is there a standard or common naming schema in this setup? The best I came up with is to label "testing, staging, and production" as "stages" and "blue/green" as "environments". Exemplary usage: "what is the status of the production stage in the blue environment?". Is there a better alternative?

Answer 1

The use of Blue and Green can be ambiguous for users unfamiliar with this naming convention.

Instead of using Blue/Green I'd suggest using Live/Idle to be more explicit (as documented here).