Considerations when managing ECS blue/green deployments using CloudFormation

The process of using CloudFormation to perform your ECS blue/green deployments through CodeDeploy is different from a standard ECS deployment using just CodeDeploy. For a detailed understanding of these differences, see Differences between Amazon ECS blue/green deployments through CodeDeploy and AWS CloudFormation in the AWS CodeDeploy User Guide.

When managing your blue/green deployment using CloudFormation, there are certain limitations and considerations to keep in mind:

Only updates to certain resources will initiate a green deployment. For more information, see Resource updates that initiate green deployments.
You can't include updates to resources that initiate green deployments and updates to other resources in the same stack update. For more information, see Resource updates that initiate green deployments.
You can only specify a single ECS service as the deployment target.
Parameters whose values are obfuscated by CloudFormation can't be updated by CodeDeploy during a green deployment, and will lead to an error and stack update failure. These include:
- Parameters defined with the NoEcho attribute.
- Parameters that use dynamic references to retrieve their values from external services. For more information about dynamic references, see Get values stored in other services using dynamic references.
To cancel a green deployment that's still in progress, cancel the stack update in CloudFormation, not CodeDeploy or ECS. For more information, see Cancel a stack update. After an update has finished, you can't cancel it. However, you can update a stack again with any previous settings.
The following CloudFormation features are not currently supported for templates that define ECS blue/green deployments:
- Declaring Outputs or using Fn::ImportValue to import values from other stacks.
- Importing resources. For more information about importing resources, see Import AWS resources into a CloudFormation stack with a resource import.
- Using the AWS::CodeDeploy::BlueGreen hook in a template that includes nested stack resources. For more information about nested stacks, see Embed stacks within other stacks using nested stacks.
- Using the AWS::CodeDeploy::BlueGreen hook in a nested stack.

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Document Conventions

About blue/green deployments

Hook syntax