How AWS Blue and Green Deployments Work

Author

Govardhana M K
June 19, 2025

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How AWS Blue and Green Deployments Work

Before a deep dive on today’s context of AWS specific Blue Green Deployments with architecture diagram, let’s first touch base on the basics of deployment strategies out there.

1. Rolling Deployment

This strategy replaces application instances in a phased manner. A subset of instances is updated from the old version (V1) to the new one (V2) while the rest continue serving users. It continues this in batches until all are upgraded.

What works well is that there’s no downtime, and resources are reused. But it can get tricky with persistent connections, long lived sessions, or database schema changes. There’s no instant rollback unless the new version is also designed to be backward compatible.

2. Canary Deployment

Only a small portion of traffic is initially routed to the new version (V2), while the majority continues to hit the current version (V1). This 95-5 or 90-10 split allows real world feedback from a limited audience without exposing everyone to potential breakage.

It’s great for controlled experiments and data backed validation. However, you must have dynamic traffic shifting capability at the load balancer level, plus monitoring hooks and alert thresholds that let you pause or promote the rollout based on early signals.

3. Blue Green Deployment

In this model, a separate environment is provisioned to host the new version. Initially, all user traffic flows to the current version. Once the new environment is tested and verified, traffic is gradually and gracefully switched to the new version using mechanisms like load balancer listener rules or DNS routing.

This enables near zero downtime and instant rollback by directing traffic back to the current version if needed. It’s ideal for cleaner rollouts, safer testing in production like conditions, and minimizes risk, though it temporarily doubles infrastructure requirements and relies on reliable traffic switch orchestration.

Having established the basics of how deployment strategies work, let’s now dive into the architecture and fine grained details of how Blue Green Deployment is implemented in AWS.

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