[AWS Experiment] 4 - Using AWS CICD

AWS CICD consists of CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline. I am not big fan of AWS CICD since there are many other ways to test & deploy applications other than using AWS. But I think if you want to develop an application fully using AWS services than AWS CICD services could be one of the best options.

CodeCommit

Things that I 😍

• User interface of the console was better than I expected. Not too confusing, simple enough.
• In security terms, I believe CodeCommit is better than GitHub. CodeCommit repositories are private by default But GitHub repositories could be way too public if you don't take care of it.

Things that I 😕

• Cloning and committing to repositories from local PC require IAM knowledge.

CodeBuild

Things that I 😍

• I really enjoyed writing buildspec.yml. The experience working with console to write buildspec.yml was pretty easy too.

CodeDeploy

Things that I 😍

• I think it was handy to select EC2 instances as a deployment group by tagging the same value. But at the same time, I thought it could be hard to manage if you don't be careful about managing tags.

• appspec.yml was not too hard to understand.

Things that I 😕

• I had to install CodeDeploy Agent on all EC2 instances in the deployment group.

• I could use CloudFormation to launch those EC2 instances as specific AMI that already has installed CodeDeploy Agent, but I felt like no one would want to use this if they are not familiar with AWS services.

• Installing CodeDeploy Agent on EC2 instances
  

#!/bin/bash

# Installing CodeDeploy Agent
sudo yum update
sudo yum install ruby

# Download the agent (replace the region)
wget https://aws-codedeploy-eu-west-3.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/latest/install
chmod +x ./install
sudo ./install auto
sudo service codedeploy-agent status

CodePipeline

Things that I 😍

• It triggers build and deploy stages as soon as I commit the changes to CodeCommit.

• With CodPipeline, I did not have to do too much work on CodeDeploy part.

• The User Interface of CodePipeline was very satisfiable.

Things that I 😕

• Still, you have to learn how to manage deployment group at the CodeDeploy.

• Hard to reach out CloudWatch log on console.