Use case
Blue-Green Deployment Strategy for
Zero Downtime
- Mihir Mandviwala
About the Customer
Bright Pay revolutionizes online payment card management with its card-on-file solution, enabling users to effortlessly save and update their payment cards across various online accounts and subscriptions. By centralizing card updates, users can conveniently manage their payment information without leaving their preferred platforms. This seamless integration benefits merchants and banks by providing them enhanced control over the card-on-file process, driving increased card usage, spending, and transaction volume from the outset.
Customer Challenge
The customer faced challenges with deploying new versions of their application without causing downtime or affecting users’ experience. Traditionally, using a rolling update strategy made it difficult to validate new application versions in production while maintaining the old version. If issues arose with the new deployment, it could cause significant disruptions. The customer needed a solution that would allow for seamless transitions between versions, validate the new environment before directing traffic, and offer an easy rollback process in case of failures, all without affecting the live service.
The risks of not addressing this challenge were considerable. Without an efficient deployment process, the customer would face potential downtime during releases, negatively impacting user experience and resulting in lost revenue. Additionally, if a new version caused failures, it would be difficult to recover quickly, prolonging service interruptions.
Solution
IAMOPS implemented a Blue-Green deployment strategy using AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) to ensure zero-downtime deployments of the Bright Pay application. The strategy involved creating two parallel environments—blue (existing live environment) and green (new environment for testing the new version).
The CI/CD pipeline was automated using Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery. Jenkins managed the build, testing, and deployment processes, ensuring that the application was containerized and pushed to the green environment on ECS. To manage the routing of live traffic, an Application Load Balancer (ALB) was employed. During the deployment phase, the ALB directed traffic to the blue environment while the green environment was set up and tested.
Once the green environment was validated, the ALB seamlessly transitioned traffic from blue to green, ensuring no downtime for users. If any issues were detected in the green environment, the system was configured to rollback and direct traffic back to the blue environment, providing a safety net that minimized the impact of failed deployments.
The deployment process was further enhanced by AWS CodeDeploy, which handled the orchestration of deployment actions within ECS and ensured smooth transitions between blue and green instances. With its Blue-Green deployment capabilities, CodeDeploy managed the rerouting of traffic and provided robust rollback mechanisms.
AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) was used to store Docker images of the application, while ECS Fargate ensured scalable, serverless container orchestration. This architecture eliminated the need to manage underlying infrastructure, reducing operational overhead and enhancing deployment efficiency.
Semantic Release Workflow
Results & Benefits
By implementing a Blue-Green deployment strategy with AWS ECS, Bright Pay achieved:
- Zero-downtime deployment, ensuring that users experienced no interruptions during the release process.
- Risk mitigation through automated rollbacks, minimizing the impact of potential deployment failures.
- Increased deployment efficiency: The parallel environment setup allowed for easy validation of new versions without affecting the live service, ensuring faster and more reliable releases.
- Simplified deployment process, enabling Bright Pay to release updates with confidence and minimal risk.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, and Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
