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LSREL09-BP02 Implement safe deployment strategies (like blue/green or canary) - Life Sciences Lens
Implementation guidanceResources

LSREL09-BP02 Implement safe deployment strategies (like blue/green or canary)

Adopt deployment patterns that minimize blast radius and allow rapid diversion to the last known good state. Phased rollouts provide early detection of issues and enable quick rollback without impacting users or downstream regulatory workflows.

Desired outcome: Failed releases can be quickly rolled back or diverted with minimal disruption to end users and regulatory processes.

Common anti-patterns:

  • Performing deployments at once without a rollback path.

  • No traffic segmentation or user impact analysis during rollouts.

  • Failing to gather metrics and health signals during phased deployments.

Benefits of establishing this best practice:

  • Limits impact to a subset of experiments or studies rather than the entire user base and workflows.

  • Enables rapid return to a validated state, protecting study timelines.

  • Improves stakeholder confidence in release safety and stability.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Choose a rollout strategy based on risk and verification needs: blue/green for fast switchovers to fully validated environments, canary for incremental exposure and metric observation, or feature-flag driven rollouts for business-level segmentation. Instrument deployments with health metrics, business KPIs, and signals so an automated or manual rollback decision can be made quickly. Validate the traffic-shift and rollback procedures during staging exercises and include them in release approvals.

Implementation steps

  1. Use blue/green deployment patterns available in AWS Elastic Beanstalk or by provisioning parallel stacks using AWS CloudFormation and switching traffic with Amazon Route 53 or load balancer reconfiguration.

  2. Use Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS with traffic shifting configured (for example, using AWS App Mesh or AWS CodeDeploy integration) to implement canary releases.

  3. Implement automated traffic shifting and rollback policies in AWS CodeDeploy so that failing canaries automatically trigger rollbacks or traffic diversion.

Resources

Related best practices:

  • Continuity of workflows and data availability during downtime

  • Resilient environment provisioning and lifecycle management

  • Automated validation in deployments