Published on Dec 01, 2022
The AWS CloudFront now supports continuous deployment, which allows configuration changes to be tested and validated with a portion of live traffic. Blue-green and canary deployment strategies are simplified with the new feature of the AWS content delivery network.
A continuous deployment of CloudFront is ideal for situations such as post-deployment verification, backward compatibility, or validating new features with a small subset of requests. As explained by Joe Viggiano, senior solutions architect at AWS, Carl Johnson, principal solutions architect at AWS, and Vishal Anand, principal product manager at AWS
As part of CloudFront continuous deployment, clients send requests to the primary distribution, and CloudFront routes some of them to a staging distribution according to the configuration settings in the continuous deployment policy. According to a weight-based configuration, a specified percentage of viewer requests (up to 15%) are routed to the staging distribution. An HTTP header-based configuration routes a request to the staging distribution instead.
Both options can be used to test the same deployment, validating changes first by header-based based on known test users and devices, and then introducing production traffic using a weight-based configuration. By connecting the viewer session to the environment, the new feature enables monitoring standard and real-time logs and quickly reverting to previous configurations when a change negatively impacts the service.
Support for blue/green and canary deployments on the AWS CDN has long been requested by developers, with different threads on Reddit and Server Fault in the past.
