AWS re:Invent 2022 New Database Release – Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments

Overview

Amazon Web Services has kick-started Its most popular event, AWS re:Invent 2022. To assist customers with their challenges and make it simpler for them to care less about their infrastructure and application workloads, AWS re:Invent 2022 has introduced many new services and features in various categories. Let us discuss on one of the important updates from the Database category in the following section.

AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon RDS blue-green deployments, a new feature for Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and MariaDB that allows you to make database updates faster, easier, and more secure. This new fully managed feature is available in almost all AWS regions except China and AWS GovCloud.

Introduction to Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployment

Making database updates can be disruptive because it is difficult to predict the required downtime to implement changes. Amazon RDS blue/green deployments allow database operators to use Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS to make safer simpler and faster database updates. blue-green deployments make it simple for you to safely test and implement changes by creating a staging environment that mirrors the production environment. It keeps the two environments In Sync using logical replication. You can make changes to the staging environment, such as major version upgrades or schema modifications while keeping your production workload safe. When promoting your staging environment Amazon RDS blue/green deployments use built-in guardrails to time out the promotion if it exists exceeds your maximum tolerable downtime. The guardrails also have built-in safety checks for detecting replication errors, instance health, and more. Once you are ready to promote the changes to production you can initiate and finish switchovers as fast as a minute, without making changes to your application code.

Amazon RDS blue-green deployments block writes on the current production system, ensure all the data is replicated to the staging environment, and then redirect traffic to the staging environment, promoting it to the production. Safely test updates to identify unexpected database behaviors and reduce downtime with Amazon RDS blue/green deployments.

Step by Step Guide for Blue/Green Deployments

To get started with Amazon RDS blue/green deployments,

1. Sign into your AWS console and search for AWS RDS service. Select any one of the DB instances you want to enable blue/green deployment for.
2. In the Actions dropdown you can see Create blue-green deployment option, Click it, and configure as per the requirement.
3. Once required options are selected like blue-green deployment identifier, and deployment settings, Click the create staging environment

Output

Conclusion

So far in this article, we have discussed about an important announcement in the Database category I.e., fully managed AWS RDS blue/green deployment. We can see that with the help of this new feature developers/architects will be able to update databases within minutes and with no complexity. There is still more to learn about AWS RDS blue/green deployment, so I encourage you to see the official documentation from AWS.

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