Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Tools on AWS

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Tools on AWS

DevOps model and tools improve companies' ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. Products and services can be enhanced and delivered to end customers faster than ever before. These advantages help companies to become more agile and competitive.

This week, we are talking about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tools on AWS.

AWS provides DevOps tools and services built to run on the AWS infrastructure; these tools help automate time-consuming and repetitive manual tasks, manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity enabled by DevOps model.

AWS CodePipeline - Software Release Workflows

AWS CodePipline is a fully managed service that helps us automate build, test, and deploy phases of your release process. Every time your code changes, the automated procedure takes over and does all the hard work for you. This automation helps companies deliver code updates rapidly and reliably.

AWS CodePipline is easy to integrate with other third-party services such as Github.

What are the most important benefits of using CodePipline?

• Quality and speed - By automating the software release process, AWS CodePipline helps companies to release new updates and features to the end-users at a much faster pace. Code quality is increased by running automated code tests.
• Configurability - Every organization and every software product is different, AWS CodePipline enables configurability in every stage of the release process.
• Integration with other tools - AWS CodePipline can be easily extended with custom or pre-built tools or such as Github or Jenkins.

AWS CodeBuild - Build and Test Code

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed service that helps us compile source code, run tests, and produce software packages ready for deploy.

The service eliminates the need for the provisioning, management, and scaling of build servers; it scales automatically and processes multiple builds concurrently.

What are the most important benefits of using CodeBuild?

• Fully managed - The service is fully managed by AWS; there is no need for patching, updating, or management of software or servers.
• Automated scaling - AWS CodeBuild scales up or down automatically, it immediately processes each submitted build and runs them concurrently if needed.
• Simple payment model - The service is charged by consumption time; this means that you only pay for the number of minutes it takes to complete your build.
• Security - Builds created with AWS CodeBuild are encrypted with customer-specific keys managed by the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). The service is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which allows fine-grain control over user-specific permissions.

AWS CodeDeploy - Deployment Automation

AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed service that helps us automate software deployments to a variety of AWS compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, or AWS Lambda.

AWS CodeDeploy eliminates error-prone manual operations and helps us simplify the release of application updates. By using AWS CodeDeploy, we can virtually avoid application downtime during the deployment procedure.

What are the most important benefits of using CodeDeploy?

• Reliability and speed - AWS CodeDeploy enables rapid, reliable, and fully automates software deployments.
• Minimized downtime - The whole process is performed incrementally, the state of application health is continuously monitored. In the case of an error, deployment can be stoped and rolled back to the previous version.
• Centralized control - Deployments can be monitored easily through the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI. We can also create push notification to notify everyone when the state of deployment changes.
• Simple adoption - AWS CodeDeploy is language-agnostic, and it works with any application. The service is easy to integrate with other continuous delivery tools such as AWS CodePipeline, GitHub, or Jenkins.

AWS CodeStar - Unified CI/CD Projects

AWS CodeStar is a tool created for the management of all software development/release activities in one place. It gives a complete overview of development and operation teams activities.

It provides a unified user interface that comes with a project management dashboard, including an integrated issue tracking capability powered by Atlassian JIRA Software. Project dashboards help us to easily track progress across the entire software development process, from the backlog of work items to teams' recent code deployments.

The tool can also be used to set up an entire continuous delivery toolchain in minutes.

What are the most important benefits of using CodeStar?

• Speed - AWS CodeStar makes it fast and simple to set up entire development and continuous delivery toolchain for coding, building, testing, and deploying of application code. It comes with pre-built templates for specific AWS instance types.
• Centralized view - AWS CodeStar provides an easy way to coordinate your day-to-day development activities. The project dashboard helps track progress across all stages of your software development process; it integrates with Atlassian JIRA Software, enabling the management of JIRA issues directly inside the AWS CodeStar dashboard.
• Team collaboration - AWS CodeStar is also a collaboration tool that allows teams to collaborate securely and efficiently. It provides simple access management for project owners, contributors, and viewers.

Conclusion

AWS provides a couple of fully managed DevOps services. These services are built to enable companies to eliminate error-prone manual tasks, speed up the delivery of software updates, allow better control of the software development/release process, and make companies more competitive.

All of the services are charged by a very straightforward "pay per use" model; companies only pay for the time service is active.

Sedmi odjel is one of the leading managed service providers in the region; we have a lot of experience in building complex CI/CD projects. No matter which services your company uses at the moment, flexibility, and a list of features that AWS tools give us can help us optimize your development workflow. The benefits are usually visible very soon, the most important being the ability to free up your companies resources to focus on your core business. There is typically a lot of room for improvement in every company.

If you have any question about DevOps tools:

• visit our dedicated DevOps page
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562
• contact our sales department at sales@sedmiodjel.com

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