Blue/green deployments on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) have long been a go-to pattern for shipping zero-downtime deployments. Historically, the recommended approach in the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) was to wire ECS to AWS CodeDeploy for traffic shifting, lifecycle hooks, and tight integration with AWS CodePipeline.
In July 2025, Amazon ECS launched built-in blue/green deployments. This allows you to operate directly within the ECS service, without requiring the use of Amazon CodeDeploy.
This post explains what changed, how the new ECS-native blue/green model compares to CodeDeploy, and how to decide which path to take in your CDK projects.
Figure1: Amazon ECS blue/green deployment with AWS CodeDeploy
Why blue/green on ECS, and what was launched in July 2025
In a blue/green deployment, two production environments are maintained: blue, the current environment, and green, the new environment. This strategy…
