Extending deployment pipelines with Amazon ECS blue green deployments and lifecycle hooks

The blue/green deployment strategy enables you to release applications by shifting traffic between two identical environments running different versions of the application. This allows you to mitigate common risks associated with deploying software, because you can roll back to a previous deployment instantly. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) recently announced native support for blue/green deployments, removing the need to manage and integrate with other deployment tools. As part of this release, Amazon ECS has also introduced lifecycle hooks for deployments. Lifecycle hooks allow you to integrate test suites, manual approvals, and metrics into your deployment pipeline. In this post we dive into lifecycle hooks and show how they can be integrated into deployment workflows.

Background

When an Amazon ECS service is created or updated, we create an immutable object of its exact specification, known as an Amazon ECS service revision. Then, the control plane attempts to deploy …