Traditionally, blue/green deployments needed 100% extra instance capacity upfront to create updated cluster copies, which could be unavailable and delay updates. The new Capacity Optimized option tries a full capacity deployment but falls back to incremental batch updates sized based on cluster and available capacity if needed, allowing domain updates to proceed with limited excess capacity.
While batch deployments may take longer than full-capacity swaps, they minimize downtime and maintain fallback environments. Customers can select deployment strategy per update via console or API. This option is recommended for clusters with 30 or more nodes and supports all OpenSearch and Elasticsearch versions in AWS commercial regions.
Source & further reading
Amazon OpenSearch Service introduces capacity optimized blue/green deployments ↗Source published 2026-03-05. This report was prepared with AI assistance from the linked primary-source material. Claims and limitations should be checked against the original announcement or research.