Blue/Green Deployments: Safe Major Version Upgrades

~10 min read

The step-by-step mechanics of how RDS validates a major upgrade before committing to it.

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Key points

  • Green is a full separate environment kept in sync with blue via native replication during validation
  • Validation can include full test suites and shadowed production read traffic against green with zero risk to blue
  • Switchover is a fast, controlled operation — not DNS propagation — completing in under a minute typically
  • Blue is retained post-switchover specifically to enable instant rollback if an issue is discovered late