🚀 Amazon ECS Now Supports Built-in Blue/Green Deployments — No Custom Tools Needed!

#aws #ecs #devops #containers

🧠 What's New?

Amazon ECS now offers native support for Blue/Green deployments — a long-awaited feature that allows teams to:

✅ Deploy new app versions alongside old ones
✅ Validate new versions before switching traffic
✅ Instantly rollback if something goes wrong
✅ Reduce risk, increase deployment speed

All of this is built into ECS — no more custom deployment scripts or third-party plugins required.

🎯 How It Works

ECS Blue/Green deployments now work with:

✅ Application Load Balancer (ALB)
✅ Network Load Balancer (NLB)
✅ ECS Service Connect

With the new ECS deployment type:

ECS provisions the new task set (green) alongside the existing one (blue).
You can run automated tests using lifecycle hooks before shifting production traffic.
ECS shifts all or partial traffic to the green version based on your config.
You can monitor the new version using CloudWatch alarms and the ECS deployment circuit breaker.
If something goes wrong? Instantly rollback with zero downtime.

🔧 Key Features

🪝 Deployment Lifecycle Hooks

Pause deployments at specific stages
Add custom health checks, smoke tests, or approvals

🧯 Automatic Rollbacks

Configure CloudWatch alarms
Enable ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker to revert failures

🕐 Bake Time Support

Let the green version run for a defined period
Roll back if issues surface before final cutover

🛠️ Full Support via:

AWS Console
AWS CLI & SDK
CloudFormation / CDK / Terraform

📌 Why This Matters

This update finally brings first-class deployment strategies to ECS-native users — previously only available in ECS+CodeDeploy or external CI/CD tools.

If you’re managing production apps on ECS, you now get: