The idea behind blue-green deployment is that your blue environment is your existing production environment carrying live traffic. In parallel, you provision a green environment, which is identical to the blue environment other than the new version of your code. When it's time to deploy, you route production traffic from the blue environment to the green environment. If you encounter any issues with the green environment, you can roll it back by reverting traffic to the original blue environment. DNS cutover and swapping Auto Scaling groups are the two most common methods used to re-route traffic in blue-green deployment.

Using Auto Scaling policies, you can gradually replace existing instances with instances hosting the new version of your application as your application scales out. This option is best used for minor releases and small code changes. Another option is to leverage DNS routing to perform sophisticated load balancing between different versions of our application.

As illustrated in the following diagram, after creating a production environment that hosts the new version of our application, you can use the DNS route to shift a small portion of traffic to the new environment:

Test the green environment with a fraction of production traffic; this is called canary analysis. If the environment has functional issues, you'll be able to tell right away and switch traffic back before impacting your users significantly. Continue to gradually shift traffic, testing the ability of the green environment to handle the load. Monitor the green environment to detect issues, providing an opportunity to shift traffic back, thus limiting the blast radius. Finally, when all the metrics are right, decommission the blue environment and release the resources.

Blue-green deployment helps to achieve zero downtime and provides easy rollback. You can customize the time to deploy as per your needs.