Down for less than four minutes a month: how AWS deploys code

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is renowned for its robust commitment to uptime, exemplified by its Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that often guarantee 99.9% uptime, with some services like DynamoDB Global Tables and AWS Key Management Service even promising 99.999% uptime. This commitment is underpinned by a sophisticated automated deployment pipeline that minimizes downtime through mechanisms such as automated rollbacks, progressive rollouts, and extensive monitoring of both service metrics and their dependencies. AWS's deployment strategy includes implementing "one-box" and "waves" stages to ensure service stability and compatibility during updates, allowing for controlled and gradual deployment across Availability Zones and regions. The process incorporates "bake" periods to detect regressions, extending deployment timeframes to ensure reliability but allowing for faster rollouts by monitoring traffic and metrics. Not just application code, but also feature flags and configuration changes are deployed through these pipelines, enhancing both safety and velocity. While companies like Graphite are inspired by AWS's processes, they face challenges in adopting these practices due to differences in scale and speed requirements, although they recognize the value of automation and are gradually integrating AWS-inspired strategies, such as blocking deployments during non-business hours and considering one-box deployments.

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