2.1 Project Overview

Overview of Project

Scenario

ZTC Labs runs a simple internal Web Application that displays environment details and serves traffic through a Load Balancer. The application is currently deployed using a basic Auto Scaling Group with no structured deployment strategy.

As the engineering team prepares to release new features frequently, they face several challenges:

  • Deployments cause downtime
  • Users sometimes see mixed or partially updated versions
  • No safe way to test new releases without impacting production
  • Rollbacks are slow and manual
  • Scaling and instance replacement is unpredictable

To support rapid development and maintain high availability, the team has decided to implement Blue-Green Deployments and Rolling Deployments on AWS.

Your role as the Cloud Engineer is to architect and implement a zero-downtime deployment system.

Our Solution

We will build two separate environments (Blue & Green) and attach both to the same ALB.

  • Build the Blue environment( current) and the Green environment (new)
  • Attach both to an Application Load Balancer
  • Shift traffic from Blue → Green safely
  • Perform a Rolling Deployment to upgrade Blue to Version 3
  • Add Lifecycle Hooks and Warm Pools for graceful, fast deployments

This mirrors real deployment pipelines used by Cloud, DevOps, and SRE teams.

About the Project

In this hands-on project, you will:

  • Build the base infrastructure: Launch Template, ASG, TG, ALB
  • Deploy the Blue environment (v1) and Green environment (v2) and cut over
  • Upgrade the Blue environment using a Rolling Deployment (v3)
  • Add Lifecycle Hooks for graceful termination
  • Add a Warm Pool to speed up future refreshes
  • Test failure and self-healing behavior like a real Cloud Engineer

By the end, you’ll have a fully working zero-downtime deployment system running in AW, a powerful portfolio project that demonstrates real production-level deployment knowledge.

Steps To Be Performed 👩‍💻

We’ll walk through the following steps:

  1. Build the Blue-Green Environment
  2. Perform Blue → Green Deployment
  3. Implement Rolling Deployment (v3)
  4. Add Lifecycle Hooks & Warm Pools
  5. Validate & Test All Deployment Scenarios

Services Used 🛠

  • Amazon EC2 – Instances running the application
  • Launch Templates – Version-controlled instance configuration
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – Blue & Green ASGs and Instance Refresh
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Traffic distribution and routing
  • Target Groups – Blue and Green routing destinations
  • IAM – Instance roles and permissions
  • VPC, Subnets, Security Groups – Networking and access control

Estimated Time & Cost ⚙️

  • Estimated Time: 2-3 hours
  • Cost: ~$1-2

➡️ Architectural Diagram

Here is the architecture diagram:

➡️ Final Result

At the end of this project, you’ll have:

  • A complete Blue-Green deployment system:

  • A Rolling Deployment pipeline using ASG Instance Refresh:

Complete and Continue