Amazon RDS blue/green deployments allow performing schema changes and maintenance tasks like ANALYZE, VACUUM FULL, adjusting fill factor, rebuilding indexes, adding columns, refreshing materialized views, and enabling extensions with minimal downtime on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

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<p>This article discusses how to perform database maintenance tasks and schema modifications in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with minimal downtime using blue/green deployments.</p>
<p>Specifically, the article covers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Solution overview of blue/green deployments</li>
<li>Prerequisites for setting up the test environment</li>
<li>Monitoring replication lag between blue and green environments</li>
<li>Use cases:
<ul>
<li>Gather statistics using ANALYZE</li>
<li>Perform VACUUM FULL on catalog tables</li>
<li>Adjust the fill factor for a table</li>
<li>Rebuild indexes for optimization</li>
<li>Add new columns with and without default values</li>
<li>Expand column size in a table</li>
<li>Refresh materialized views</li>
<li>Enable required extensions in shared_preload_libraries</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Limitations of blue/green deployments</li>
<li>Cleanup steps</li>
</ul>
<p>Conclusion: Blue/green deployments allow performing maintenance operations and schema changes with minimal impact on the production database.</p>
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