Amazon ECS now supports built-in linear and canary deployments
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announces support for linear and canary deployment strategies, giving you more flexibility and control when deploying containerized applications. These new strategies complement ECS built-in blue/green deployments, enabling you to choose the traffic shifting approach that best matches your application's risk profile and validation requirements.
With linear deployments, you can gradually shift traffic from your current service revision to the new revision in equal percentage increments over a specified time period. You configure the step percentage (for example, 10%) to control how much traffic shifts at each increment, and set a step bake time to wait between each traffic shift for monitoring and validation. This enables you to validate your new application version at multiple stages with increasing amounts of production traffic. With canary deployments, you can route a small percentage of production traffic (typically 5-10%) to your new service revision while the majority of traffic remains on the current stable version. You set a canary bake time to monitor the new revision's performance, after which Amazon ECS shifts the remaining traffic to the new revision. Both strategies support a deployment bake time that waits after all production traffic has shifted to the new revision before terminating the old revision, so you can quickly roll back to the previous version without downtime if issues are detected. You can configure deployment lifecycle hooks to perform custom validation steps, and use Amazon CloudWatch alarms with ECS deployment circuit breaker to automatically detect failures and trigger rollbacks.
The feature is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. You can use linear and canary deployment strategies for new and existing Amazon ECS services that use Application Load Balancer (ALB) or ECS Service Connect using the Console, SDK, CLI, CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform. To learn more, see Amazon ECS linear deployments and Amazon ECS canary deployments in the Amazon ECS Developer Guide.