A blue/green deployment is to create two separate but identical environments. Here the blue environment runs the current application version, and the green runs the new application version. The blue/green deployment strategy increases application availability and reduces deployment risk by simplifying the rollback process if a deployment fails. It is necessary to keep these two environments in sync with each other so you may safely test and upgrade your changes to production. Blue/Green Deployments on Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS with MySQL compatibility enable users to implement database updates and choose availability over the benefits that would gain from updating their databases. In this blog, we will go through the steps of Blue/Green Deployment.
Blue/Green Deployments for MySQL Clusters
Step 1: Select the database that needs updating in the AWS Management Console.
Step 2: Click on Create Blue/Green Deployment under the Actions drop-down menu.
Step 3: Select my-aurora-mysql under the DB identifier. Here you can modify the engine version, DB cluster parameter group, and DB parameter group for green databases. For Blue/Green Deployment in your Aurora MySQL DB cluster, you should turn on binary logging, changing the value for the binlog_format parameter from OFF to MIXED in the DB cluster parameter group.
Step 4: In the database of RDS, select Create Blue/Green Deployment under Actions to create a new staging environment and run automated tasks to prepare the database for production.
In the case of short engine versions like 5.7 for Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible upgrade, add a targetEngineVersion parameter and specify the engine version to be upgraded.
Now you will have a staging environment ready for test and validation.
Step 5: After testing and qualification of changes, choose Switch over under Actions to promote the staging environment marked as Green to be the new production system.
Step 6: Check the settings of green databases to verify whether they are ready for the switchover to production. And set a timeout for the maximum time limit of switchover.
After the switchover, Blue/Green Deployments will not delete the old production environment, so you have to delete the old production environment when you don’t need it. And this old production environment will have standard charges.
Conclusion
Blue/Green Deployments on Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS are the best way to minimize risk and downtime. And in minutes, you can promote the staging environment to be the new production environment with no data loss. With Blue/Green Deployments, all upgrades, schema modifications, and operating system or maintenance updates without affecting production workloads.
Metclouds Technologies experts help you to minimize the risk and downtime in updating databases with the blue/green deployment technique.