The downtime for switching between RDS Blue/Green Deployments has been reduced to less than 5 seconds.
This is Onikai (@fat47) from the Service Reliability Group (SRG) of the Media Division.
#SRGThe Service Reliability Group primarily provides comprehensive support for the infrastructure surrounding our media services, focusing on improving existing services, launching new ones, and contributing to open-source software (OSS).
This article summarizes the fact that the RDS Blue/Green Deployments feature now switches over in less than 5 seconds.
I hope this is of some help.
What are RDS Blue/Green Deployments?RDS Blue/Green Deployments receive feature updates.I tried measuring the B/G switching downtime using a shell script.In conclusion
What are RDS Blue/Green Deployments?
RDS Blue/Green Deployments is a feature announced in 2022 that allows you to easily create a Green cluster, automatically establish replication with the Blue environment, and complete the switchover with a single button click.
Please refer to previous blog posts for more details.
When switching between B/GMaximum downtime of 1 minuteDespite this, it was a very useful feature that could also be used for major version upgrades of clusters.
RDS Blue/Green Deployments receive feature updates.
The following updates were released on January 20, 2026.
Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments Reduce Downtime to Less Than 5 Seconds
This update willDowntime during B/G switching has been reduced to less than 5 seconds.It has been decided that it will be done.
I tried measuring the B/G switching downtime using a shell script.
We performed an RDS B/G switchover while running the following script and measured the downtime.
Measurement script (measure_aurora_downtime.sh)
The target environment is Aurora MySQL 3.04.
Set the necessary environment variables and then run the program.
The background/green light switch will be performed during execution.
Measurement results
This script connected to MySQL each time a command was executed, so in the test environment...Downtime is 1.6 secondsThat's it.
With such a fast transition, the impact on services during the switchover should be quite minimal.
In conclusion
RDS Blue/Green Deployments was already a useful feature, but this update makes it even more convenient.
I was in the process of upgrading Aurora MySQL from 3.04 LTS to 3.10 LTS, so the upgrade should proceed smoothly.
One point to note is,Depending on the application, there may be a downtime of about 30 seconds.So be careful.
In the scenario I encountered, the issue occurred in environments where the JVM's DNS TTL and connection timeout values were set to the default of 30 seconds, causing performance issues.
Perform B/G switchover testing in a real service environment and measure the downtime.
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