AWS CodePipeline

What Is AWS CodePipeline?

The success of your DevOps practices depends on how you create your CI and CD pipeline. In continuous delivery software development methodology, the release process is automated. Every time a change in the code happens, it is automatically built, tested, and deployed to production. 

Whereas, in continuous integration software development practice, team members use a version control system and frequently integrate their work to the same location, such as the main branch. Each change is built and verified to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Continuous integration is focused on automatically building and testing code, as compared to continuous delivery, which automates the entire software release process up to production.

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that helps you release your software. With AWS CodePipeline, you can make the full release process for building your code, deploying to pre-production environments, testing your application, and releasing it to production. Further, it builds, tests, and deploys your application according to the defined workflow every time code changes. Apart from that, you can integrate various tools (partner or custom) into any stage of the release process to form an end-to-end continuous delivery solution.

Features and Benefits of AWS CodePipeline:

• Automated Release Processes: CodePipeline end-to-end automates your release process. This process starts from your source repository and goes through build, test, and deployment. However, you can prevent changes from moving through a pipeline by including a manual approval action in any stage except the Source stage. It gives you complete freedom as to when, how, and where you want to release your application.
• Consistent Release Cycle: You can define a consistent set of steps for every code change. CodePipeline runs each stage of your release according to your criteria and speeds up the delivery and ensures quality. Once you automate your release process, it allows developers to test and release code quickly, and so new features can be offered to your customers without any delay.
• Configurable Workflow: With AWS CodePipeline, you can model the different stages of your software release process by using the console interface - the AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or the AWS SDKs. You can run tests easily by specifying the tests to run and customize the steps to deploy your application and its dependencies.
• Easy to Integrate: Whether your needs are big or small, AWS CodePipeline adapts to your specific needs, as you can use pre-built plugins or your own custom plugins in any step of your release process. For example, you can pull your source code from GitHub, use your on-premises Jenkins build server, run load tests using a third-party service, or pass on deployment information to your custom operations dashboard.

How AWS CodePipeline Enhanced Lululemon Athletica’s  Efficiency?

Lululemon is a Canadian company that sells yoga-inspired apparel and other clothing at more than 350 locations throughout the world. Several years ago, Lululemon planned to offer digital services and push out new applications and features faster. However, the company had a crowded IT department and it wasn’t easy to develop new applications quickly. 

For example, the company’s developers needed to set up development environments, which used to take many days even for small-scale experiments. Besides being costly, the process wasn’t fast enough. Lululemen experienced the need for streamlining its development processes to support its new continuous integration and delivery focus. The organization’s agenda was clear: simplify management and automate as many development processes as possible.

As a result, Lululemon chose AWS services to engineer a fully automated, continuous integration and delivery system. Although the company used various AWS services, yet of all the services, the most preferred were only two: 

• AWS CloudFormation templates to define its complete development environment. 

• AWS CodePipeline, a continuous delivery service that enables fast and reliable application updates. 

Once the changes were made, the company witnessed many benefits like:

• The development time decreased, which reduced the development cost and allowed the company to experiment more and deliver new features and applications much faster.
• Because of lesser manual steps, the manageability of the environments improved.
• Development system transparency improved, as by seeing the virtual pipeline, the effect of continuous integration and deployment was visible.
• By making user-friendly mobile applications, the company could engage better with local communities.

Conclusion

From an organization’s perspective, the deployment time is crucial because it could make or break the situation. If things work as planned, then there is no trouble, but by any means, you receive negative feedback from the users, all your hard work goes in vain. The development itself is a critical task, and on top of it, if you have to fix the issues post-deployment, it doubles your cost and pain. And everyone hates it, that’s why they invest in a continuous delivery tool like AWS CodePipeline.

It builds, tests, and deploys your applications faster and lets you integrate various tools with it.