Deploying feature flags and configuration data in AWS AppConfig - AWS AppConfig
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Deploying feature flags and configuration data in AWS AppConfig

After you create required artifacts for working with feature flags and freeform configuration data, you can create a new deployment. When you create a new deployment, you specify the following information:

  • An application ID

  • A configuration profile ID

  • A configuration version

  • An environment ID where you want to deploy the configuration data

  • A deployment strategy ID that defines how fast you want the changes to take effect

  • An AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key ID to encrypt the data using a customer managed key.

When you call the StartDeployment API action, AWS AppConfig performs the following tasks:

  1. Retrieves the configuration data from the underlying data store by using the location URI in the configuration profile.

  2. Verifies the configuration data is syntactically and semantically correct by using the validators you specified when you created your configuration profile.

  3. Caches a copy of the data so it is ready to be retrieved by your application. This cached copy is called the deployed data.

You can mitigate situations where deploying configuration data causes errors in your application by using a combination of AWS AppConfig deployment strategies and automatic rollbacks based on Amazon CloudWatch alarms. A deployment strategy enables you to slowly release changes to all targets or specific segments over minutes or hours—either session-based or along your own target dimension by leveraging entity-based deployments. After you configure CloudWatch, if one or more alarms go into the alarm state during a deployment, AWS AppConfig automatically rolls back your configuration data to the previous version. For more information about deployment strategies, see Working with deployment strategies. For more information about automatic rollbacks, see Monitoring deployments for automatic rollback.

Note

AWS AppConfig Agent (version 2.0.136060 or later) supports deploying feature flag or free-form configuration data to specific segments or individual users during a gradual rollout. Entity-based gradual deployments ensure that once a user or segment receives a configuration version, they continue to receive that same version throughout the deployment period, regardless of which compute resource serves their requests. For more information, see Using AWS AppConfig Agent for user- or entity-based gradual deployments.

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