ECS blue/ green deployment using CDK

A walkthrough for this example can be found at https://ecsworkshop.com/blue_green_deployments/

Table of Contents

• Outcome
• What are we building?
• Why do I need this?
• What are the pre-requisites?
• How can I deploy the stack?
• Cleanup
• Security
• License

Outcome

ECS blue/ green deployment CDK construct enabling teams to build and deploy pipeline for their workloads.

What are we building?

• CodePipeline will be used for executing Blue/Green deployment using CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
• The container images will be stored in the Elastic Container Registry
• NGINX sample application is deployed in AWS Fargate
• The construct uses a custom resource for creating the deployment configuration and builds the end-to-end infrastructure

Why do I need this?

• With a blue/green deployment, you provision a new set of containers on which CodeDeploy installs the latest version of your application. CodeDeploy then re-routes load balancer traffic from an existing set of containers running the previous version of your application to the new set of containers running the latest version
• Blue/green deployments allow you to test the new application version before sending production traffic to it without disrupting the existing environment
• If there is an issue with the newly deployed application version, you can roll back to the previous version faster than with in-place deployments
• Switching to the green environment involves no downtime. It only requires the redirecting of user traffic
• Rolling back from the green environment to the blue environment in the event of a problem is easier because you can redirect traffic to the blue environment without having to rebuild it
• You can incorporate the principle of infrastructure immutability by provisioning fresh instances when you need to make changes. In this way, you avoid configuration drift.

What are the pre-requisites?

brew install jq
npm install -g -f [email protected]
cd $HOME && mkdir -p environment && cd environment
git clone https://github.com/aws-containers/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments.git
cd $HOME/environment/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments

• You have configured AWS CLI using aws configure
• You have the set the AWS_REGION within aws configure
• The role being used from CLI has the permissions required for resources being created by CDK
• HTTPS (GRC) is the protocol to use with git-remote-codecommit (GRC). This utility provides a simple method for pushing and pulling code from CodeCommit repositories by extending Git. It is the recommended method for supporting connections made with federated access, identity providers, and temporary credentials
• Install git-remote-codecommit with pip install git-remote-codecommit

How can I deploy the stack?

• Install dependencies and build

  npm install
  npm run build
  npm run test

• Deploy the CodeCommit and CodeBuild resources

  cd $HOME/environment/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments
  ./bin/scripts/deploy-container-image-stack.sh

• Push the source code to CodeCommit
  • The source code is available here
  • The buildspec.yml has placeholders for the variables

    export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=$(aws configure get region)
    export CODE_REPO_NAME=nginx-sample
    export CODE_REPO_URL=codecommit::$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION://$CODE_REPO_NAME
    cd $HOME/environment && git clone $CODE_REPO_URL && cd $CODE_REPO_NAME
    cp $HOME/environment/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments/nginx-sample/* .
    git checkout -b main
    git remote -v
    git add .
    git commit -m "First commit"
    git push --set-upstream origin main

• Deploy the CodePipeline resources

  cd $HOME/environment/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments
  ./bin/scripts/deploy-pipeline-stack.sh

Cleanup

cd $HOME/environment/ecs-workshop-blue-green-deployments
./bin/scripts/destroy.sh

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.