Blue/Green deployment in AWS

Blue/Green deployment in AWS

January 13, 2021 / Nirav Shah

Deploy, test and manage applications with real-world traffic

Blue/Green deployment is a methodology by which you can release and test different applications via shifting traffic between two same environments which are running different versions of that application.

Blue/green deployments can reduce risks associated with deploying software.

Blue/green deployments provide appx. zero-downtime with rollback and release capabilities.

There is a blue and green environment in this, where the blue environment is for the current application version in our production environment.

Where, the green environment is for running the different version of your application in the production environment .

When the green environment is supposed to ready and pass all the tests, our live production traffic is redirected from blue to green.

If it’s not suitable for our production we can roll back to the blue environment.

Nowadays, Blue/green deployments become popular, so developers and companies are applying this methodology to new and innovative use cases.accordion

Benefits of Blue/Green

• It was quite difficult to manage or evaluate a new version of application at ahen old version of the application is already running. So at that time Blue/green deployments provide an isolation between them. It ensures that your both applications run fine and reduces your deployment risk.
• If in case you discover the green environment is not running as per expectation, there is no impact on the blue environment and You can roll back to the blue environment at any time during the deployment process.
• Once the deployment is successful, you decommission the blue environment and stop paying for the resources it was using.
• In AWS, blue/green deployments provide cost optimization.

AWS Tools and Services Enabling Blue/Green Deployments

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling
• AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Route 53
• Amazon CloudWatch

Blue/Green Deployments Are Not Recommended aat when

when implementing blue/green deployment it comes up with much risk, due to workarounds or additional “moving parts” in the deployment process.

These complexities introduce additional points of failure, or advantage for the process to break down.

Conclusion

blue/green methodology reduces the risks, such as human error, process, downtime, and rollback capability. The AWS utility model expands the automation tools to make it easy for customers to move forward and cost-effectively implement.