Our client, a prominent investment management firm, faced significant challenges due to their rigid infrastructure and architecture. As an investment company, maintaining constant availability — 24/7, 365 days a year — is not just essential but a cornerstone of their commitment to customer trust and industry excellence. These limitations hindered their ability to effectively manage disaster recovery and perform smooth rollbacks in the event of critical bugs. The inflexible system led to frequent maintenance windows, which disrupted service availability and negatively impacted user experience.
Users experienced interruptions during deployment periods, and critical bugs could result in prolonged service outages. The lack of a robust disaster recovery plan made the system vulnerable to regional outages, further compromising service reliability and user satisfaction. The firm needed a solution to enhance system resilience, ensure uninterrupted service, and provide a seamless user experience even during maintenance or emergencies.
Given that the goal was to ensure smooth and seamless updates to software while drastically minimizing disruption and risks, we would need a strong release management strategy. The application userbase was active throughout the day, creating a unique challenge in identifying the best maintenance window for the latest updates. Transaction processing and data streaming were highly crucial during user sessions. Hyniva identified that the Blue-Green Deployment strategy would be the ideal solution to tackle these challenges.
In Blue-Green Deployment, there are two identical production environments simultaneously running at any given time. This strategy enables seamless delivery of new features to the application with minimized risks and near-zero downtime for the end user. Also, configuration of two production environments allows easier and safer rollbacks in case of errors. Once the configuration was completed, Hyniva performed a test run to demonstrate the process to the client. The Blue-Green Deployment process involved the following steps:
Two Environment Configuration
The current production environment is labelled as Blue which handles the live traffic, and the staging environment for the new version is labelled as Green. All new features can be extensively tested on Green without affecting any Blue users.
Quality Assurance Testing
The quality assurance team performs automation testing, manual quality assurance and performance checks in the Green environment to ensure that the new version is functioning and operating as expected by the business team.
Switch Traffic
Once the new version was cleared by the quality assurance team, the traffic from Blue environment is switched seamlessly over to Green. Hyniva developed an automated switch using global accelerator and CloudFront that is triggered by AWS Lambda.
Monitor & Review
Once the environment switch is completed, the team closely monitored production to ensure smooth user experience and operations. In the event of an issue or disaster recovery scenario, rollback is easily performed by switching traffic back to the Blue environment.
For our client, the Blue-Green strategy was a game-changer for several reasons. As an investment management firm, ensuring their trading platforms and financial services are always available was crucial for strengthening customer trust and loyalty. Data security was enhanced, and transaction processing was further streamlined. The Blue-Green Deployment strategy provided the following advantages:
The Blue-Green Deployment strategy significantly enhanced our client's operational efficiency. By adopting this strategy, the firm achieved uninterrupted 24/7 access, drastically reduced deployment downtime by nearly 95%, and accelerated deployment times by 70%. The ability to conduct thorough testing of new features and seamlessly roll back if needed further minimized potential risk factors and enabled a seamless user experience with nearly zero downtime. Our client is now also prepared with robust infrastructure to manage and recover from failures, strengthening the resilience of their disaster recovery plan. This successful implementation not only bolstered the firm's reliability but also strengthened our strategic partnership and further cemented Hyniva as a trusted AWS Partner.