The basic description of a software release cycle is “the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software.”
A “release” is the official launch of the application. A build, when tested and certified by the software testing team, is provided to the customers as a “release”.
When we as developers talk about CI/CD or CICD, we are talking about continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early. By integrating regularly, you can detect and locate errors faster and easier.
CICD is a development practise where code changes are automatically prepared for a release to production. CICD expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a QA environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When properly implemented, developers will always have a deployment-ready build.
Continuous delivery lets developers like Silicon Overdrive automate testing beyond unit tests so we can verify application updates across multiple dimensions before deploying to your production environment.
Our testing encompasses UI testing, load testing, integration testing, API reliability testing, and more. This process helps us thoroughly validate updates and pre-emptively discover issues.
With AWS, it is easy for us to automate the creation and replication of multiple environments for testing, which was previously difficult to do on-site.
With continuous delivery, every code change is built, tested, and then pushed to a QA or staging environment. There can be multiple, parallel test stages before a production deployment.
The difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the presence of a manual approval to update to production. With continuous deployment, production happens automatically without explicit approval.
CICD often bridges the gap between development and operations teams by automating the building, testing, and deployment of applications.
The AWS global infrastructure is designed and built to deliver the most flexible, reliable, scalable, and secure cloud computing environment with the highest quality global network performance available today. Every component of the AWS infrastructure is design and built for redundancy and reliability, from regions to networking links to load balancers to routers and firmware.
AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. It makes it easy for teams to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.
AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to automate software deployments, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations. The service scales to match your deployment needs.
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model you define.
This enables you to rapidly and reliably deliver features and updates. You can easily integrate AWS CodePipeline with third-party services such as GitHub or with your own custom plugin. With AWS CodePipeline, you only pay for what you use. There are no upfront fees or long-term commitments.
AWS CodeStar makes it easy for your whole team to work together securely, allowing you to easily manage access and add owners, contributors, and viewers to your projects. Each AWS CodeStar project comes with a project management dashboard, including an integrated issue tracking capability powered by Atlassian JIRA Software. With the AWS CodeStar project dashboard, you can easily track progress across your entire software development process, from your backlog of work items to teams’ recent code deployments.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk – you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
Different combinations of AWS services and products can achieve a CICD pipeline; depending on your needs.
There are many ways to setup CICD pipelines, depending on the development team and preferences.
This performs the deployment process and will control the downloading of the artifact from the S3 bucket, extracting the code and updating the destination.
This performs the deployment process and will control the downloading of the artifact from the S3 bucket, extracting the code and updating the destination.
