AWS CodePipeline - Part 1 (Introduction)

AWS CodePipeline is one of the most widely used Continuous Delivery services at present. AWS CodeBuild acts as the key role behind the AWS CodePipeline. Due to various AWS resources such as Amazon S3, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, and third-party resources like GitHub and Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline touches a wider area in the Continuous Delivery process.

WitCentre took a step forward to share knowledge on Amazon Web Services. Which is one of the best cloud computing technologies all around the world. If you are new to AWS technologies, this article might be quite advance to you. But do not forget that trying beyond the target will help you to get in to the target at some point! Thus, keep reading this easy article to catch up the basics on the most well known service in AWS! This article will be short and sweet for a quick read up.

What is AWS CodePipeline?

As its name implies, this is kind of a general pipeline that gives some end product after going through a set of operations. AWS CodePipeline is one of the most widely used cloud service for Continuous Delivery process in software industry. If you aware of Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CICD) process, you might know how important CD is. Hence, AWS CodePipeline provides a very simple but very strong way to automate your software release process by ensuring fast delivery, reliable resources, high security, and easy maintenance of the infrastructure with multiple advance resources which are fully managed by AWS. If you need to know about CICD process, please wait for an article from WitCentre soon.

How AWS CodePipeline fits in software delivery process?

Well, let's have a look at how this will be plugged in a real world CICD process.

Figure 1: CICD pipeline for a software release with AWS CodePipeline

Figure 1 above shows a small CICD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline as the Continuous Delivery process. As you can see, there is a developer who only applies the code changes to the respective GitHub repository. After the changes are committed to the repository, AWS CodePipeline can detect them automatically and starts the pipeline for software release. Thus, this makes the developer's life easy by not get them engaged in the software deployment process. They just have to commit their changes to the GitHub repository and end users will receive the latest product with those updates very quickly.

Hope you could catch up what is CICD process/pipeline here in brief and where AWS CodePipeline actually fits in.

Figure 1 clearly shows AWS CodePipeline in a dotted-line rectangle. You can see and think about the components inside the rectangle. In here, I have listed only very few services that AWS supports for CodePipeline. Though it seems so simple, there are very strong concepts behind the CodePipeline that everyone of us must be aware of if we are dealing with AWS CodePipeline. For the moment, just think about the stages, arrows inside the rectangle, resources shown inside stages, and the variety of resource types.

To keep the article short and sweet, this will be the end of this article. Hope you could get some sort of a start towards a new AWS technology. Keep your eye on WitCentre for the next articles on AWS CodePipeline. Learn with simple, short, and proper explanation quickly.

Conclusion

• AWS CodePipeline can be used to automate the software release process with fast, reliable, and easy maintenance of the infrastructure.
• It is one of the most widely used services for the Continuous Delivery (CD) process of a software release.
• There are variety of AWS Managed services to be used in AWS CodePipeline.
• The next article will be on stages of AWS CodePipeline.
  

Do you need to manage your AWS CodePipeline with all the best practices? See here!

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