AWS CodePipeline Reviews

I use CodePipeline with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy.

My main use case is around building a small product. We've created a framework by leveraging AWS and Azure services. It functions as a table-driven approach, it allows us to switch features of the product on or off.

We've set up CI/CD pipelines to enable these services, ensuring security and automatically propagating framework tables and metadata into the target environment.

For example, as part of a customer's day zero setup, we provide them with the necessary tools to start their development. We utilize AWS CodeCommit to store our product components and then enable the CI/CD pipeline to seamlessly transfer these components from our tenancy to the customers.

The functionality allows you to define multiple steps and dynamically create or destroy agents as required, saving costs. You can also connect to various repositories like AWS CodeCommit, GitLab, or GitHub. 

Moreover, you can trigger other jobs or even other pipelines from one CI/CD pipeline.

While I haven't personally tested it, the documentation suggests that it's possible to call Azure Repos or Jenkins pipelines/jobs from AWS CodePipeline.

I use the solution for my deployments.

Earlier, it used to be a struggle when we had different ecosystems. We did not always have purely server-based or serverless ecosystems. Every company has a combination of server-based, serverless, and container-based architecture. There are different environments, too. It would be a complex task to create a separate ecosystem for everything. If we do the same in CodePipeline, it is like a simple configuration file. We can have integrations for each service. They can be for the containers with EKS or the Lambda functions.

Our primary use case for CodePipeline involves deploying the different services, such as hosting a website on ECS or EC2 and deploying source code on container services or EC2 instances. We configure the source code with remote repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket, build the code, and store images in ECR. We use these images for deployments in ECS clusters.

CodePipeline has helped our organization by simplifying the deployment of services for small and medium customers on EC2 or ECS clusters. Customers have saved time with this tool.

I am a freelancer, and I usually work with many companies across the globe. I have been doing it for over the last five years. I work with various AWS services, mainly focusing on ECS, EC2, S3, CodePipeline, and RDS. 

Additionally, I work with serverless services like Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, and DynamoDB. I use CodePipeline for continuous integration and continuous deployment, deploying to Elastic Beanstalk and ECS. I also use CodeBuild to build Docker images and use CodeDeploy for ECS clusters. I deploy CloudFormation stacks using CodePipeline for infrastructure provisioning and deploying to Lambda.

Recently, we deployed our microservices application into ECS cluster, leveraging CodePipeline for deployment across different environments like dev, staging, and prod. CodePipeline helps with unit testing using CodeBuild and deploying directly to ECS. It's robust and reliable for our deployment process.

The best thing about AWS CodePipeline is that we don't have to manage agents. I have worked in Jenkins for three years, but when it comes to AWS CodePipeline, you don't have to manage agents. We pay for the agents only when the build occurs. In the case of Jenkins, we have to provision a standardized node to work as an agent.

In Jenkins, we can use custom plugins from the open-source market to integrate the pipeline with any third-party application. In AWS CodePipeline, we can only use certain tools for which AWS provisions plugins. Otherwise, we have to create Lambda functions and write our own Lambda code to make those tools compatible with each other.

We recently used a DAST tool called Rapid7, for which we didn't have a plugin. We have a plugin for Rapid7 in Jenkins, but we don't have a plugin in AWS CodePipeline. We had to write a Lambda function using the Requests module to do all the authentication.

We use the product for CI/CD implementation and integration with services like CodeDeploy, AmazonMQ, CloudWatch, and Fargate.

The most valuable feature of AWS CodePipeline lies in its role as a comprehensive umbrella service, including developer tools like CodeDeploy, CodeBuild, and CodeCommit. It helps develop CI/CD implementations with centralized management of code building, deployment, and version control.

I use the solution in my company, and we implement it whenever the tool is required in a project.

The need for the tool depends on the requirement. Some customers require closed and compact CI/CD pipelines; in such cases, we prefer AWS CodePipeline as the best option since it will be in a suitable environment. If the customers want some free sources, we can go with free sources. In our company, we have multiple CI/CD tools as well, but that completely depends on how much security the customers require and how much of a closed environment is required. AWS CodePipeline has some of the best features provided. The tool provides ample options, so we can use AWS Secrets Manager on those things where we can use AWS STS for some of the things, which will be much more helpful when working with a closed and secured environment.

Actually, the tool has multiple valuable features. When it comes to security, we have ample options to secure credentials, or whatever crucial data is there that is not supposed to be exposed. We can keep things in multiple environments, so we can create some environment variables from AWS Secrets Manager. From the environment variables, we can create different environments. The aforementioned area consists of one of the best features of the tool. Regarding additional features, we can use cross-account deployment, one of the tool's best features. When it comes to cross-account deployment, keeping one centralized account and deploying multiple applications in a different account is trending nowadays.

I use the solution in my company to automate code deployments, build pipelines, and deploy the application with source codes from GitHub webhooks.

I cannot specifically say which feature is helpful in the product. I can say that continuous integration helps pull source code more easily than manual pushing.