Deploying is hard. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been there your team ships a new release, something breaks, and rolling back becomes a frantic nightmare. That’s exactly what one of our clients was struggling with.
In this blog, We’ll walk you through how we helped them transform their deployment strategy using AWS ECS, Bitbucket Pipelines, and a suite of AWS tools and in the process, eliminated rollback issues, improved security, and built a more resilient, scalable system.
The Problem: Rollbacks Were a Disaster
A software development company delivering solutions across industries, was facing major headaches:
- Failed Rollbacks: Any issue during deployment meant long downtimes and error-prone manual rollbacks.
- On-Prem Limitations: Testing and deploying on their on-prem infrastructure wasn’t cutting it. No elasticity, no scale.
- Secrets Chaos: Managing environment variables and credentials manually was messy and insecure.
They needed a solution that was cloud-native, automated, secure, and could handle rollbacks gracefully.
Cloud-Native CI/CD on AWS
We designed a modern deployment pipeline using AWS services, containerization, and automation. Here’s what we built:
1. Containerization with AWS ECS
We migrated their applications to Amazon ECS using Fargate for serverless container management. This allowed seamless scaling, better resource utilization, and smooth orchestration of services.
No more dependency hell. No more worrying about provisioning infrastructure manually.
2. Secure Secrets Handling with AWS Secrets Manager
Instead of hardcoding secrets or juggling environment files, we centralized secrets management with AWS Secrets Manager. During deployments, environment variables were pulled securely into containers no leaks, no surprises.
3. Database Reliability with Amazon RDS
We moved their database to Amazon RDS, gaining automated backups, high availability, and effortless failovers.
4. Traffic Distribution with Elastic Load Balancer
ELB helped us route traffic intelligently to healthy instances. That meant zero-downtime deployments and better user experiences even under load.
5. Blazing Fast Static Delivery with S3 + CloudFront
Static assets (images, scripts, etc.) were pushed to S3, with CloudFront providing global low-latency delivery.
6. CI/CD Pipeline with Bitbucket
Here’s the fun part we set up an automated pipeline that:
- Fetches secrets from AWS Secrets Manager
- Builds Docker images tagged with the commit ID
- Pushes them to Amazon ECR
- Registers a new ECS task definition
- Updates the ECS service with the new task
All triggered by a commit or merge. Fully automated, versioned, and traceable.
Built-In Rollback That Just Works
To fix the rollback issue once and for all, we added:
- Versioned Task Definitions: ECS keeps a history of task definitions. We retained previous stable versions for quick rollback.
- Auto-Rollback Script: If the pipeline detects a failed deploy (e.g., app doesn’t become healthy), it automatically rolls back to the last working task definition.
Monitoring & Alerts: CloudWatch monitors app health and deployment status. If things go south, alerts are triggered and rollback kicks in.
The Results
- 99.5% Deployment Success Rate
Thanks to automated rollback, deployments became non-events. Errors? Auto-reverted. Stability? Through the roof. - Scalability & Performance
ECS + RDS + ELB = effortless scaling during traffic spikes, no intervention required. - Security Boost
No more secrets in source code. Secrets Manager handled it all securely. - Faster Releases
CI/CD shaved hours off every release. Developers just pushed code, and the pipeline handled the rest.
Cost Efficiency
Moving from on-prem to cloud optimized resource usage and reduced maintenance costs.
Tech Stack Recap
- Rollbacks shouldn’t be an afterthought they should be built-in.
- Secrets management is critical for secure and consistent deployments.
- Automating everything reduces human error and accelerates releases.
- ECS + CI/CD gives small teams enterprise-grade deployment muscle.
Lessons Learned
- Rollbacks shouldn’t be an afterthought they should be built-in.
- Secrets management is critical for secure and consistent deployments.
- Automating everything reduces human error and accelerates releases.
- ECS + CI/CD gives small teams enterprise-grade deployment muscle.
Ready to Ship with Confidence?
If you’re struggling with rollbacks, manual deployments, or secret sprawl, consider going the cloud-native route. Container orchestration with ECS, automated pipelines, and secrets management can help you ship faster, safer, and smarter.
Have questions or want to implement something similar for your organization? Let’s connect
Conclusion
By implementing AWS ECS and other AWS services, we ensured that our client’s deployment process became more reliable, secure, and scalable, effectively eliminating the rollback issues they were facing. This robust solution enabled the client to continue delivering high-quality software, providing a strong foundation for their ongoing success.