What is Blue Green Deployment?
5K- by Kanav Preet
- 12th Jan, 2021
- Last updated on 10th Mar, 2021
- 8 mins read
Deployment is the process of updating code and other activities on the server to make software available for use.
In the current situation, there is an increase in demand for continuous deployment to stay current with software updates, so as to provide the user with good quality application experience. There are many techniques available in the market for this, and in this article, we will be discussing about Blue Green Deployment.
What is Blue-Green Deployment?
Blue Green Deployment is a software release model that consists of two identical production environments; Blue and Green, configured in a way where one environment is live and the other is in staging (idle) state.
The idea behind this is to redirect traffic between two environments running with a different version of the application.
This process eliminates downtime and reduces the risk that happens due to deployment. In case any error occurs with the new version, we can immediately roll back to the stable version by swapping the environment.
In some organizations, it is also termed as Red Black Deployment.
Working of Blue Green Deployment:
To implement Blue-Green deployment, there should be two identical environments. Also, this requires Router or Load Balancer so that traffic can be routed to the desired environment.
In the image, we have two production environments, Blue and Green. The Blue environment is one where current (let's say version 1) of the application is running and is live as well. All the traffic of the application is directed to Blue by Router or load balancer (as per the infra set up). Meanwhile, version 2 of the application is deployed and tested on Green Environment.
Currently, at this stage, we can refer to Blue environment as Live and Green as idle or at staging state.
Once the code for version 2 is tested and ready to be live for production, we redirect the traffic from Blue Environment to Green Environment, making Green as Live and Blue as a staging environment. If any problem is detected with the Infrastructure or application after version 2 is made live, we can roll back to the previous version just by swapping the environment.
Blue Green deployment matches all requirements of seamless, safe and fully reversible conditions for ideal deployment, but there are some practices that need to be adopted for smooth process, for eg. automating the workflow so that there is minimum human intervention, reducing chances of manual error.
Along with that, it is also important to keep monitoring in place for Blue Green application.
Tools and Services for Set-Up:
Based upon infrastructure and application, there are various services i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud, Cloudfoundry etc available which can be used to implement Blue-Green Deployment.
We will be discussing further on Blue Green deployment on Cloud and the steps to implement it.
The advent of Cloud in Blue-Green Deployment:
The advent of cloud computing in deployment has helped the system to reduce associated risks.
Cloud utilities of infra management, billing and automation have made it easier to implement Blue-Green Deployment, making it a quicker task at a lower cost.
AWS Services for Blue-Green Deployment:
By utilizing AWS for Blue-Green Deployment, we can access many services that help in automation of deployment and infrastructure i.e. AWS CLI, SDK, ELB, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation etc. There are a number of solutions that AWS provides which we can use, some of them being:
- DNS Routing with Route53
- Swapping of Autoscaling Group with ELB
- Using Elastic Beanstalk and swapping Application
- Blue-Green Deployment using AWS Code Deploy
- Cloning Stack in OpsWork and Updating DNS.
We will discuss Using Elastic Beanstalk and swapping Application in detail:
Using Elastic Beanstalk and swapping Application
Elastic Beanstalk provides us with the ease in deployment. Once we upload application code with some version on Elastic Beanstalk and provide information about application, it deploys our application in Blue Environment and provide its URL.
The above Environment configuration is then copied and used to launch the new version of application-i.e. Green Environment with its different and own URL.
This point of time our application is Up with two environments but traffic is going only to Blue Environment.
For Switching the environment to Green and serving traffic to it, we need to choose other Environment details from Elastic Beanstalk Console and Swap it using Action menu. It leads Elastic Beanstalk to perform DNS Switch and once DNS changes are done, we can terminate Blue Environment. In this way, traffic will be redirected to Green Environment.
For Rollback, we need to invoke the Switch Environment URL again.
Steps to perform Blue-Green deployment in AWS:
- Open Elastic Beanstalk console from AWS and select the Region where we need to set up an environment.
- Either we can launch a new environment or clone the existing environment.
- Deploy and test the new application environment. For deploying, the new version chooses Environment and name from the list. Click on upload and deploy.
- We can use screen form to upload source bundle.
- On the Overview page, choose Environment action and choose Swap environment URL.
- Choose the environment name, under Select an environment to swap column and click on Swap.
Who Can Benefit from Blue-Green Deployments?
Blue-Green Deployment provides us with minimum Down Time and reliable deployment.
Blue-Green Deployment has become useful in deploying an application for Development Teams, but it can be used under the below scenarios:
- There should be identical and isolated environments.
- There should be the provision for router or Load Balancer.
- System should work with Continuous Update.
Different Types of Deployment
There are a number of deployment techniques being used in the industry to deploy the application. As a DevOps Engineer, it becomes important to know the insights about different techniques based on our infrastructure providing and choose the right technique as per the impact on the end-user.
- Blue-Green Deployment: Blue Green deployment provides us with high availability and rollback in case of critical bugs found. It consists of two environments running in parallel. One environment will be live and others will be in staging, thereby, making our application downtime free.
- A/B Deployment: A/B Deployment is similar to Blue-Green Deployment with the difference that we send a small amount of traffic to another Server (another environment). The usage of A/B Deployment is generally when we need to check the utilization of features in the application.
Along with that, it can also be used to check user feedback on the new version. - Canary Deployment: Canary deployment is used when we need to release the full features of the application in subsets. Generally in Canary, we have a set of servers assigned to a different set of users. This deployment is important when we need to deploy features along with getting feedback
- Rolling Deployment: In Rolling Deployment, there is a process where we replace currently running code server with a new version in a tandem way. Pausing the deployment is much easier in this.
Advantages of Blue-Green Deployment
- No Downtime Deployment: With Blue Green Deployment, whenever there is a critical bug found on the production server, traffic is redirected to other environments. This leads to no downtime for the end-user.
- Standby: Whenever there is a system failure, we can immediately perform rollback and recover safely without disturbing the end-user. With Blue Green deployment, once we switch to the new version of application, the older version of the application is still available. Therefore, in case of recovery, we can easily swap the environment and redirect the traffic back to the old version. Blue Green has proven to be impactful in reducing risk in the application development process.
- Immediate Rollback: In some cases where the new feature is not working properly, we can switch to the older feature of application by performing a rollback.
- Testing in Prod Environment: There are scenarios when deploying a new set of code works fine on local, but when deployed in the larger infrastructure, it becomes problematic. By using Blue-Green Deployment, we can check the performance of code on the Prod server without disturbing users.
Disadvantages of Blue-Green Deployment:
Since many people are heading toward Blue-Green Deployment, there are some cases where this process is not recommended.
In some cases, it involves risk which makes deployment more prone to failure and breakdown.
- Database Sync Up: Schema changes are complex to decouple. In the case of Blue Green deployment, syncing of database and data changes should be synchronized between the Blue and Green environment. In case of relational database, it can lead to discrepancies.
- QA/UAT Identify of Failure: In some scenarios, with large infra, it is possible that sometimes QA test cases will not detect errors/bugs in a non-live environment
- Dashboard Required: Since we have two identical production environments with a different version of code, while running the deployment it becomes important to monitor insights with packages and code at any point of time to trigger things.
- Cost: For Blue-Green Deployment, we have two sets of environments running in parallel all time, thus increasing the cost of two production environments and maintaining them.
Conclusion:
Blue Green deployment is one of favourable technique to deploy application . Since every deployment technique and application has its own pros and cons , therefore team should collaborate and work on choosing the right deployment technique for their application according to tools, and services used to host your application.
For deployment technique to work on, there is no fixed approach that will suit and work in every scenario. there should be extensive research before settling for any deployment technique.
Kanav Preet
Kanav is working as SRE in leading fintech firm having experience in CICD Pipeline, Cloud, Automation, Build Release and Deployment. She is passionate about leveraging technology to build innovative and effective software solutions. Her insight, passion and energy results in her engaging a strong clientele who move ahead with her ideas. She has done various certifications in Continuous delivery & DevOps (University of Virginia), tableau , Linux (Linux foundation) and many more.
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Nowadays , most of public clouds are running multiple flavors of virtualization so a must have 3 – 5 years of virtualization experience with VMware, KVM, Xen, Hyper-V is required along .#2 - Solution Architect RoleAlong with deployments or virtualization experience, understanding and implementation of all the hardware technologies in breadth is a must like storage and networking. Nowadays there is a very high-demand for people who can design a solution that scales and performs with high availability and uptime with minimal amount of resources to feed on (Max utilization) .#3 - A Passionate Programmer/API ExpertiseBash, Powershell, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Python etc are few of popular scripting languages one need to have expertise on to become an effective DevOps Engineer. A DevOps engineer must be able to write code to automated repeatable processes. One need to be familiar with RESTFUL APIs.#4 - Integration Skillset around CI-CD toolA DevOps engineer should be able to use all his expertise to integrate all the open source tools and technique to create an environment that is fully automated and integrated. The goal should be for zero manual intervention from source code management to deployment state, i.e. Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.#5 - Bigger Picture & Customer FocusWhile the strong focus on coding chops makes software engineering a natural path to a career in DevOps, the challenge for candidates who are coming from this world is that they need to be able to prove that they can look outside their immediate team and project. DevOps engineers are responsible for facilitating collaboration and communication between the Development and IT teams within an organization, so to succeed in an interview, you’ll need to be able to demonstrate your understanding of how disparate parts of the technical organization fit and work together.In nutshell, all you need are the list of tools and technologies listed below -Source Control (like Git, Bitbucket, Svn, VSTS etc)Continuous Integration (like Jenkins, Bamboo, VSTS )Infrastructure Automation (like Puppet, Chef, Ansible)Deployment Automation & Orchestration (like Jenkins, VSTS, Octopus Deploy)Container Concepts (LXD, Docker)Orchestration (Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm)Cloud (like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Openstack)What are DevOps certifications available in the market? Are they really useful?In 2018, DevOps professionals are in huge demand. The demand for DevOps professionals in the current IT marketplace has increased exponentially over the years. A certification in DevOps is a complete win-win scenario, with both the individual professional and the organization as a whole standing to gain from its implementation. Completing a certification in the same will not only provide added value to one’s profile as an IT specialist but also advance career prospects faster than would usually be possible.The certifications related to DevOps are categorized into 1) Foundation, 2) Certified Agile Process Owner & 3) Certified Agile Service ManagerThe introductory DevOps Certification is Foundation and certified individuals are able to execute the concepts and best practices of DevOps and enhance workflow and communication in the enterprise.Yes, these DevOps certifications hold numerous benefits in the following ways:1. Better Job OpportunitiesDevOps is a relatively new idea in the IT domain with more businesses looking at employing DevOps processes and practices. There is a major gap between the demand for DevOps Certified professionals and the availability of the required DevOps professionals. IT professionals can take advantage of this huge deficit in highly skilled professionals by taking up a certification in DevOps for validation of DevOps skill set. This will ensure and guarantee much better job options.2. Improved Skills & KnowledgeThe core concept of DevOps revolves around brand new decision-making methods and thought processes. DevOps comes with a host of technical and business benefits which upon learning can be implemented in an enterprise. The fundamentals of DevOps consist of professionals working in teams of a cross-functional nature. Such teams consist of multi-disciplinary professionals ranging from business analysts, QA professionals, Operation Engineers, and Developers.3. Handsome SalaryRapid penetration of DevOps best practices in organizations and their implementation in the mentioned organizations is seeing massive hikes in the pay of DevOps professionals.This trend is seen to be consistent and sustainable according to industry experts the world over. DevOps professionals are the highest paid in the IT industry.4. Increased Productivity & EffectivenessConventional IT workplaces see employees and staff being affected by downtime which can be attributed to waiting for other employees or staff and other software and software related issues. The main objective of an IT professional at the workplace would be to be productive for a larger part of the time he/she will spend at the workplace. This can be achieved by minimizing the time spent waiting for other employees or software products and eliminating the unproductive and unsatisfying part of the work process. This will boost the effectiveness of the work done and will add greatly to the value of the enterprise and the staff as well.If you are looking out for the “official” certification programs for DevOps, below are some of the useful links:1) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional2) Azure certifications | Microsoft3) Google Cloud Certifications4) Chef Certification5) Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Ansible Automation6) Certification - SaltStack7) Puppet certification8) Jenkins Certification9) NGINX University10) Docker - Certification11) Kubernetes Certified Administrator12) Kubernetes Certified Application Developer13) Splunk | Education Programs14) Certifications | AppDynamics15) New Relic University Certification Center16) Elasticsearch Certification Programme17)SAFe DevOps courseDevOps engineer examBelow are the list of popular DevOps Engineer exams and certifications details -DevOps Exam Syllabus Training Duration Minimal Attempts Exam Re-Take InformationAWS Certified DevOps EngineeAWS_certified_devops_engineer_professional_blueprint.pdf3 MonthsNo Minimal RequirementWaiting Period: 14 days before they are eligible to retake the exam.No limit on exam attempts until the test taker has passedRHCA certification with a DevOpsRED HAT CERTIFIED3 Days for each training• Red Hat Certificate ofWaiting Period: 1 weekconcentrationARCHITECT: DEVOPScourseExpertise in Platform-as-a-Service • Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Atomic Host Container Administration • Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Containerized Application Development• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Ansible Automation • Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Configuration ManagementDocker Certification Associate ExamDCA ExamNo Minimal AttemptsWait 14 days from the day you fail to take the exam againCertified Kubernetes Associate ExamCKA Exam4-5 WeeksNo Minimal AttemptsWait 14 days from the day you fail to take the exam againChef Certification ExamChef Cert Exam8 HoursLinkMinimal 1 week time
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- by Ajeet Singh Raina
- 30 Oct 2018
- 13 mins read
Who is DevOps engineer? DevOps enginee... Read More
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