What steps should the engineer perform to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of downtime?
Use CloudFormation to deploy an additional staging environment and configure the Route 53 DNS with weighted records. During cutover change the Route 53 A record weights to achieve an even traffic distribution between the two environments. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful.
Use a single AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment to deploy the staging and production environments. Update the environment by uploading the ZIP file with the new application code. Swap the Elastic Beanstalk environment CNAME. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful.
Use a single AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment and an AWS OpsWorks environment to deploy the staging and production environments. Update the environment by uploading the ZIP file with the new application code into the Elastic Beanstalk environment deployed with the OpsWorks stack. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful.
Use AWS CloudFormation to deploy an additional staging environment, and configure the Route 53 DNS with weighted records. During cutover, increase the weight distribution to have more traffic directed to the new staging environment as workloads are successfully validated. Keep the old production environment in place until the new staging environment handles all traffic.
Explanations:
While using CloudFormation for staging environments with Route 53 weighted records is a valid strategy, this approach doesn’t specify a rollback mechanism in case of deployment failure. The focus is on distributing traffic between two environments rather than automatically handling failure scenarios or rolling back to the previous version.
Elastic Beanstalk is a suitable option for managing deployments, but it does not address the use of weighted DNS records or rollback automation to minimize downtime. Elastic Beanstalk can swap environments, but this doesn’t involve a clear rollback process or ensure a smooth traffic transition.
Combining Elastic Beanstalk with OpsWorks does not provide a seamless solution for managing a staging environment and rolling back to a previous version in case of failure. This approach is overly complex and doesn’t leverage best practices for traffic distribution and failover.
Using CloudFormation to deploy a staging environment and configuring Route 53 with weighted records allows for gradual traffic shifting to the new environment. This strategy minimizes downtime by allowing traffic to be directed to the new environment while keeping the old environment in place. It also provides a clear rollback mechanism if issues arise, as traffic can be adjusted back to the old environment if necessary.
As far as I’m aware, the answer is:
Use AWS CloudFormation to deploy an additional staging environment, and configure the Route 53 DNS with weighted records. During cutover, increase the weight distribution to have more traffic directed to the new staging environment as workloads are successfully validated. Keep the old production environment in place until the new staging environment handles all traffic.