Posted On: May 9, 2018

This Quick Start builds an architecture for blue-green deployment to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk environment. It creates a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline using AWS CodePipeline for a cost-effective, fault-tolerant architecture. The deployment is automated by an AWS CloudFormation template and takes about 15 minutes.

When an application is deployed to Elastic Beanstalk, having two separate, but identical, environments—blue and green—increases availability and reduces risk. The blue environment is the production environment that normally handles live traffic. The pipeline creates a clone (green) of the live environment (blue) and then swaps the URLs between them. While AWS CodePipeline deploys code to the original environment—and testing and maintenance occur—the temporary clone environment handles the live traffic.

After deployment to the blue environment, and once code review and testing are done, the pipeline again swaps the URLs. The blue environment serves the live traffic again, and the pipeline terminates the green environment.

You can deploy with or without Git to S3 integration.

To get started:

Quick Starts are automated reference deployments that use AWS CloudFormation templates to deploy key technologies on AWS, following AWS best practices.