Major CI/CD Tools on AWS

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of products for CI/CD, and these products are grouped into AWS CodeSuite which includes the following services:

• CodeCommit
• CodeBuild
• CodeDeploy
• CodePipeline

CodeCommit

Software development teams are able to collaborate in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem using version or source control which serves as a single source of truth. Teams can install their own source control system or use available offerings from different providers like Microsoft’s GitHub, Atlassian’s Bitbucket, AWS’s CodeCommit, Subversion, and Azure DevOps. AWS CodeCommit allows the storing of code in a secure and organized manner. CodeCommit uses private repositories to organize source codes and allows the seamless integration of Git tools. Code reviews can be done and other tools that AWS offers for CI/CD can be easily integrated with CodeCommit.

CodeBuild

Developers use CI to compile source code and integrate changes in a secure manner. AWS offers CodeBuild for this purpose. CodeBuild allows for the creation of build projects, which essentially include information on how a build should run, where the source code can be retrieved from, which build environment should be used, which build commands to run, as well as what the output of the build process is and where to store it. It is also important to note that CodeBuild uses a script file known as buildspec.yml to automate the build process.

CodeDeploy

AWS also offers CodeDeploy, which guarantees the ability to centrally manage application deployments across different environments. The service is very elastic and allows the rolling out of large or small deployments seamlessly.

To get started with AWS CodeDeploy, a new application needs to be created, as well as a deployment group with the appropriate deployment settings. It is also important to note that CodeDeploy uses a script file known as appspec.yml to automate the deployment process.

CodePipeline

To be able to deliver code changes more reliably and frequently, development teams implement the CI/CD pipeline. AWS offers CodePipeline, which is an integrated flow that contains the pulling of the source code from the repository, the building of the source code, and the actual deployment to the target environment. It contains the following stages:

• Source
• Build
• Deploy

Even though CodePipeline can be customized to fit, it gets triggered every time a code change is made in the source repository.