Implement Blue/Green Deployments with Docker and AWS

Abstract: Modern software systems demand deployment strategies that eliminate downtime and ensure continuous service availability. Traditional in-place deployments cause service interruptions ranging from minutes to hours, directly impacting user experience, customer trust, and business revenue. This project implements a Blue/Green Deployment strategy for a containerized Node.js e-commerce web application hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The system leverages Docker for containerization, AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for versioned image storage, AWS EC2 for compute infrastructure, and an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) for intelligent traffic routing between Blue and Green environments. The Blue environment serves live production traffic, while the Green environment hosts the updated application version. Following automated health-check validation, the ALB listener rule is updated to switch traffic from Blue to Green in under one second, achieving true zero-downtime deployment. Emergency rollback reverses the switch in under 30 seconds without service interruption. Evaluation results confirm that the system sustains over 450 requests per second with average response times below 115 ms, while all health check test cases pass successfully. The project provides a reproducible, enterprise-grade reference architecture for DevOps practitioners adopting continuous deployment pipelines.

Keywords: Blue/Green Deployment, Docker, AWS EC2, AWS ECR, Application Load Balancer, Zero-Downtime Deployment, Node.js, DevOps, Containerization, Cloud Computing, Continuous Delivery.