CASE 61 · LYRIC · 2025
Deploys that the customer doesn’t notice. Not even the canary one.
A consumer mobile app had a deployment process that took the API into degraded mode for 20-30 seconds during each release, three times a day. Players noticed; reviews complained. We replaced it with ALB-weighted canaries and blue/green deploys that don’t touch the served traffic shape.
Consumer mobile
RELIABILITY
2025
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
DEPLOY-INDUCED DEGRADATION
0s
CANARY DETECTION
< 90s
PLAYER COMPLAINTS
−96%
DEPLOYS / DAY
3 → 7
HOW IT WENT
The 25-second degradation came from the deploy strategy: drain connections, replace tasks, drain again. In aggregate the API was fine; for the unlucky players whose request landed during the swap, the connection got reset and the app retried.
We replaced it with ALB-weighted blue/green: green provisioned alongside blue, weighted traffic gradually shifted from 100/0 to 95/5 (canary), then 80/20, 50/50, and so on. CloudWatch alarms on error rate and latency could halt the rollout. CodeDeploy orchestrated the whole thing.
Deploy-induced degradation dropped to zero — measurable in monitoring, invisible to players. Bad-deploy detection lands inside 90 seconds via the canary alarms. Deploy frequency more than doubled because nobody fears the deploy anymore. The app store rating recovered.
RELATED · SAME DOMAIN
Other engagements in this space.
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Let's get your AWS bill (and architecture) in order.
The discovery call is free. You walk away with at least one concrete idea — even if we never work together.