In a blue-green deployment strategy for Tableau Server, the primary goal is to minimize downtime and risk by having two identical production environments. The critical step to ensure data consistency is synchronizing the production data and configurations from the active (blue) environment to the new, idle (green) environment. This is typically accomplished by performing a full backup of the blue environment and restoring it to the green environment just before the cutover. This action ensures that all content, user permissions, and settings are identical at the moment traffic is redirected, preventing any data loss or inconsistent user experience.

A. Running performance tests validates the green environment's readiness and capacity but does not ensure the production data itself is current or consistent.

C. Implementing load balancing is the mechanism used to redirect traffic from the blue to the green environment; it does not handle the synchronization of data within them.

D. Increasing storage capacity is a resource allocation task. While necessary for growth, it does not guarantee that the data is a consistent replica of the blue environment.

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1. Official Vendor Documentation: Tableau Server Help. The official upgrade guide outlines a process that is functionally a blue-green deployment. It explicitly states the necessity of backing up the existing (blue) installation and restoring it to the new (green) installation to ensure all data is carried over.

Source: Tableau Server Documentation

"Perform a Blue/Green Upgrade of Tableau Server".

Reference: In the section "Step 3: Backup existing Tableau Server data and restore to the new installation

" the guide states: "To perform a blue/green upgrade

you must backup your existing Tableau Server data

and then import that data into your new Tableau Server installation." This backup-and-restore process is the synchronization step.

2. Academic Publication: The principles of blue-green deployment are well-established in software engineering literature. Data synchronization is consistently identified as a critical phase.

Source: Shandor

S.

& Smolander

K. (2018). "Continuous delivery pipeline patterns." In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2018 (EASE '18). Association for Computing Machinery

New York

NY

USA

250–255.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3210459.3210486

Reference: The paper discusses deployment pipeline patterns

including blue-green. It implicitly supports the need for data consistency by describing the new environment as a "clone of the production environment" (Section 3

"Blue-Green Deployment")

which requires data and state to be synchronized before the switch. The challenge of "handling database migrations and stateful services" is highlighted as a key consideration.