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Insights, thoughts, and trends from our team.
Second Blog
The blue/green deployment technique enables you to release applications by shifting traffic between two identical environments that are running different versions of the application. Blue/green deployments can mitigate common risks associated with deploying software, such as downtime and rollback capability. This whitepaper provides an overview of the blue/green deployment methodology and describes techniques customers can implement using Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and tools. It also addresses considerations around the data tier, which is an important component of most applications.
First Blog
You can shift traffic all at once or you can do a weighted distribution. For weighted distribution with Amazon Route 53, you can define a percentage of traffic to go to the green environment and gradually update the weights until the green environment carries the full production traffic. This provides the ability to perform canary analysis where a small percentage of production traffic is introduced to a new environment. You can test the new code and monitor for errors, limiting the blast radius if any issues are encountered. It also allows the green environment to scale out to support the full production load if you’re using Elastic Load Balancing(ELB), for example. ELB automatically scales its request-handling capacity to meet the inbound application traffic; the process of scaling isn’t instant, so we recommend that you test, observe, and understand your traffic patterns. Load balancers can also be pre-warmed (configured for optimum capacity) through a support request.