In this article, I detail how our DevOps team reduced deployment time by 50% using ECS Blue/Green Deployment with AWS CodeDeploy. By replacing rolling updates with parallel environments and shifting traffic only after successful health checks, we enabled zero-downtime releases, faster rollouts, safer rollbacks, and improved CI/CD efficiency.
We significantly improved our deployment process by adopting ECS Blue/Green Deployment using AWS CodeDeploy, which allowed us to reduce deployment time by more than 50%. Previously, our team relied on rolling updates for ECS services, which often led to slower rollouts, brief downtimes, and minimal rollback control. By implementing the Blue/Green strategy, we deployed new versions to a separate (green) environment while keeping the current (blue) environment live. Traffic was only shifted to green after successful health checks, ensuring zero downtime and a much safer release process. This also enabled automatic rollbacks in case of failure, enhanced visibility into deployment health via CloudWatch metrics, and improved confidence across the team. As a result, our typical deployment time dropped from 20 minutes to under 10, while also improving stability, traceability, and developer productivity. Overall, Blue/Green deployment became a key pillar of our CI/CD strategy, helping us ship faster with fewer risks.