In this chalk talk, we share best practices for making decisions around designing blue/green or canary deployments for your application or infrastructure updates. We focus on applications running on Amazon EC2, and we use AWS CodeDeploy to automate deployments. We also take a deeper look at some of the advanced features, such as how to reroute traffic while your application is running. Finally, we share some examples of how to consume an Auto Scaling group with AWS CodeDeploy.

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Advanced Deployment Best Practices
with AWS CodeDeploy
Jeet Shangari
Sr. Technical Account Manager
Amazon Web Services
D E V 4 0 4
Deblina Gupta
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services

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A measure of innovation agility
How many deployments am I performing?
How many are done out of hours?
How many suffer emergency roll backs?
“Too many to count’”“We have a quarterly release cycle”
“We minimize customer impact” “Time is irrelevant”
“We frequently catch problems too late and
need to rollback from pre-release backups”
“We roll forwards not back”

4. ”If the development team is frequently called in the
middle of the night, automation is the likely
outcome. If operations is frequently called, the
usual reaction is to grow the operations team.”
James Hamilton
Distinguished Engineer, AWS

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Strive for continuous deployment.
Use metrics and tooling to gain trust

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AWS Code Services and Infrastructure as Code
Amazon
S3
Prod-subnet
Web
server
App
server
Amazon RDS
ELB
Dev-subnet
Auto Scaling group
Web
server
Auto Scaling group
App
server
Amazon RDS
ELB
Test-subnet
Web
server
App
server
Amazon RDS
ELB
AWS CodePipleline AWS CodeDeployAWS CodeCommit
Services
- Highly available Amazon
CloudWatch
alarm
AWS CloudTrail
AWS
CloudFormation
AWS Elastic
Beanstalk

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AWS CodeDeploy
Scale from single instance to thousands
Multiple configurations for zero downtime deployment
Centralize deployment control and monitoring
Configurable deployment hooks
Deploy to Amazon EC2, On-Prem & AWS Lambda
Staging
CodeDeploy
v1, v2, v3
Production
Dev
Application
revisions
Deployment groups

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Application: What you are deploying
– a container for revisions
Revision: A
given version of
your
application
Instance: Target
instance for
deployment
Deployment groups: Group of
instances – a construct for
environment segregation
(Blue/Green, A/B, and more)
AppSpec file: Describes actions
that needs to be taken pre- or post-
deployment
Deployment: The action
of deploying a new
revision onto instances
Deployment config: Rules for how the
deployment gets farmed out to instances. For
zero downtime deployments

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Step one: Package your application
• Install dependency packages
• Start Apache
• Confirm successful deploy
• More!
• Send application files to one
directory and configuration files to
another
• Set specific permissions on
specific directories and files

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Step two: Set up environments and deployment
v2 v2 v2 v2 v2 v2
one at a time
half at a time
all at once
v2 v2 v2 v1 v1 v1
v2 v1 v1 v1 v1 v1 Agent Agent
Dev deployment group
OR
Prod deployment group
Agent
AgentAgent
Agent Agent
Agent

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Step three: Deploy!
aws deploy create-deployment
--application-name MyApp
--deployment-group-name TargetGroup
--s3-location bucket=MyBucket,key=MyApp.zip
AWS Command Line
Interface (AWS CLI) &
SDKs
AWS Console
CI/CD partners
GitHub

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AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
100%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
EC2 instances
ELB
90% 10%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MSQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
EC2 instances
ELB
50% 50%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
EC2 instances
ELB
0% 100%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
EC2 instances
ELB
0% 100%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
100%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeDeploy: Blue/Green deployment
Amazon
Route 53
EC2 instances
ELB
100%
Amazon
DynamoDB
MySQL RDS
instance
ElastiCache
Cache Node
Blue/Green Deploys
▪ We stand up a duplicate part of our
infrastructure and slowly cut traffic over
to it
✓ Shift via DNS
✓ Makes it easy to do testing of new
features
✓ Makes it easy to roll back
▪ As we shift more traffic over, let auto-
scaling grow/shrink our instances of the
new or old application
✓ Shut down the old when no traffic

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Health tracking—Catch deployment problems
v2v2 v2
Load
Balancer

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Health tracking—Catch deployment problems
v3 v2 v2Stop
Load
Balancer

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Health tracking—Catch deployment problems
v2v2 v2
Load
Balancer
Rollback

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NEW: Can deploy AWS Lambda!
Uses AWS SAM to deploy serverless applications
Supports Lambda Alias Traffic Shifting enabling
canaries and blue|green deployments
Can rollback based on Amazon CloudWatch
metrics/alarms
Pre/Post-Traffic Triggers can integrate with other
services (or even call Lambda functions)
AWS CodeDeploy + AWS Lambda

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CodeDeploy comes with a number of added capabilities:
• Custom deployment configurations. Examples:
• “Canary 5% for one hour”
• “Linear 20% every one hour”
• Notification events via SNS on
success/failure/rollback
• Console with visibility on deploy status, history, and
rollbacks
AWS CodeDeploy + AWS Lambda

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Best practices
1. Introduce changes often (in smaller iterations)
2. Drive your application with continual testing and continuous delivery
• Detect and revise the change early (fail fast)
3. Actively monitor through CloudWatch alarms
• automatically roll back a deployment when a deployment fails
4. Use canary deployments to identify issues and automatically roll back
• Great for serverless apps (debug locally via SAM)
5. A blue/green deployment model is easier to get right – can be used in most cases
6. Automate deployments as part of your scale-up processes
7. Warming caches & services

26. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Deblina Gupta
Jeet Shangari
@jeetshan

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Deployment patterns
Deploy in place—Application ONLY!
• Deploy all at once (service outage)
• Rolling updates
Blue-Green deployment—Application & Infrastructure (AMI)
• Discrete environment
• Multiple environments from branches
• Support A/B testing
• “Rolling DNS”

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AWS CodeDeploy: In-Place deployment