The Zero-Downtime Playbook: 3 Key Strategies to Consider
Every minute your users experience downtime or bugs, you lose trust and revenue. Rushing changes without safety checks can cause outages, but being too cautious can slow down innovation. How can cloud-native teams deploy fast and stay safe?
Today, we’ll tackle that tension head-on by comparing three zero-downtime strategies—blue/green, canary, and GitOps-driven rollouts—through the lens of AWS services and Infrastructure as Code. Along the way, we’ll:
Help you decide which of the three strategies fits your needs.
Highlight the trade-offs in cost, complexity, and rollback speed.
Provide three real IaC examples (Terraform, Helm charts, Argo CD manifests) so you can get started right away.
Share five essential AWS-aligned tool categories that enable zero-downtime rollouts.
Ready? Let’s get to it!
1. Blue/green deployments
Blue/green deployment is essentially the “double your environment” strategy. You create two identical environments:
Blue: The live environment currently serving users.
Green: The environment where the next version is deployed and tested.
Initially, all user traffic is directed to blue, ensuring that the green environment can be safely used for deploying and validating the new release, without exposing users to untested code. Once you’re confident that green is stable and production-ready, you switch traffic over to it. Green becomes the new live environment; blue can be retired or kept on standby.
In AWS terms, this is called “shifting traffic between two identical environments that are running different versions of your application” to eliminate downtime and make rollbacks painless.
