Amazon ECS blue/green deployments

Reduces risk through testing with production traffic before switching production. You can validate the new deployment with test traffic before directing production traffic to it.

Zero downtime deployments. The production environment remains available throughout the deployment process, ensuring continuous service availability.

Easy rollback if issues are detected. If problems arise with the green deployment, you can quickly revert to the blue deployment without extended service disruption.

Controlled testing environment. The green environment provides an isolated space to test new features with real traffic patterns before full deployment.

Predictable deployment process. The structured approach with defined lifecycle stages makes deployments more consistent and reliable.

Automated validation through lifecycle hooks. You can implement automated tests at various stages of the deployment to verify functionality.

Bake time - The duration when both blue and green service revisions are running simultaneously after the production traffic has shifted.

Blue deployment - The current production service revision that you want to replace.

Green deployment - The new service revision that you want to deploy.

Lifecycle stages - A series of events in the deployment operation, such as "after production traffic shift".

Lifecycle hook - A Lambda function that verifies the deployment at a specific lifecycle stage.

Listener - A Elastic Load Balancing resource that checks for connection requests using the protocol and port that you configure. The rules that you define for a listener determine how Amazon ECS routes requests to its registered targets.

Rule - An Elastic Load Balancing resource associated with a listener. A rule defines how requests are routed and consists of an action, condition, and priority.

Target group - An Elastic Load Balancing resource used to route requests to one or more registered targets (for example, EC2 instances). When you create a listener, you specify a target group for its default action. Traffic is forwarded to the target group specified in the listener rule.

Traffic shift - The process Amazon ECS uses to shift traffic from the blue deployment to the green deployment. For Amazon ECS blue/green deployments, all traffic is shifted from the blue service to the green service at once.

Resource usage: Blue/green deployments temporarily run both the blue and green service revisions simultaneously, which may double your resource usage during deployments.

Service auto scaling: If your service uses auto scaling, be aware that auto scaling is not blocked during a blue/green deployment, but the deployment might fail under certain circumstances.

Deployment monitoring: Blue/green deployments provide more detailed deployment status information, allowing you to monitor each stage of the deployment process.

Rollback: Blue/green deployments make it easier to roll back to the previous version if issues are detected, as the blue revision is kept running until the bake time expires.