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OPS06-BP08 Automate testing and rollback - AWS Well-Architected Framework (2022-03-31)

OPS06-BP08 Automate testing and rollback

Automate testing of deployed environments to confirm desired outcomes. Automate rollback to a previous known good state when outcomes are not achieved to minimize recovery time and reduce errors caused by manual processes.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You deploy changes to your workload. After your see that the change is complete, you start post deployment testing. After you see that they are complete, you realize that your workload is inoperable and customers are disconnected. You then begin rolling back to the previous version. After an extended time to detect the issue, the time to recover is extended by your manual redeployment.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: By testing and validating changes following deployment, you are able to identify issues immediately. By automatically rolling back to the previous version, the impact on your customers is minimized.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Low

Implementation guidance

  • Automate testing and rollback: Automate testing of deployed environments to confirm desired outcomes. Automate rollback to a previous known good state when outcomes are not achieved to minimize recovery time and reduce errors caused by manual processes. For example, perform detailed synthetic user transactions following deployment, verify the results, and roll back on failure.

Resources

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