CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline automates continuous delivery, allowing you to develop workflows using CodeBuild and CodeDeploy which can be monitored using CloudWatch.

Concepts

• Pipelines define the software release process.
• Executions are invocations of a pipeline.
• Stages contain action groups, which contain actions.
• Action Groups contain sets of actions which run in parallel with each other.
• Actions perform build/test/deployment operations on the source code and artifacts.
• Transitions are the connections between stages and allow halting a pipeline execution.
• Artifacts allow stages to accept input emitted by other stages.
• Action Types declare actions to be carried out.

Stages

Pipelines must contain a source stage and either a build or deployment stage.

• Source fetches the source code.
• Build builds the source code to produce deployable artifacts.
• Deployments get the built artifacts (or source code) to a deployed environment.

At least one of build and/or deployment must be provided. Both are expressed as a series of actions.

Actions

Actions provide the logic for interactions with external services that carry out the heavy lifting to build and release software.

Source

The built-in Source action supports the following providers:

• CodeCommit
• ECR
• S3
• GitHub

Build

The Build action performs a build in a supported provider:

• CodeBuild
• Jenkins

Test

Tests can be used to gate the release of the software on the results of a test suite in a supported service:

• CodeBuild
• Device Farm
• Jenkins
• Ghost Inspector
• BlazeMeter
• StormRunner
• Runscope

Deploy

The Deploy action performs a deployment to a supported AWS service:

• CloudFormation
• CodeDeploy can be used to perform deployments to on-premise infrastructure.
• Elastic Beanstalk
• OpsWorks
• Service Catalog
• Alexa Skills Kit
• ECS
• ECS blue-green

Approval

Approval provides a means of gating a release based on human approvals.

Invoke

Invoke can execute Lambda functions, allowing extension of the CodePipeline service to perform bespoke actions.

Monitoring

• CodeDeploy Triggers publish notifications to an SNS topic.
• CloudWatch Events route CodePipeline events to the specified targets.

Pricing

• $1 per active pipeline
• Inactive pipelines are free