CI/CD in AWS using CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully composed continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It helps us automate the applications’ building, testing, and deployment by compiling source code, running tests, and producing deployable artifacts. Here’s an overview of AWS CodeBuild and the benefits of using CI/CD approach in it:

• Continuous integration
• Scalability and flexibility
• Fully managed service
• Build environments
• Integration with AWS services
• Build logs and artifacts
• Cost optimization
• Security and compliance

We can automate the build and test processes, reduce manual effort, ensure code quality, and accelerate the delivery of the applications by using AWS CodeBuild in the CI/CD workflow. The representation of the workflow is given below:

Before starting the CI/CD in AWS, we should have these pre-requisites fulfilled:

• We should first make an AWS account.
• We should sign in as an IAM user. We can not sign in as a Root user.
• We should have Git installed in our system.

CI/CD

CI stands for Continuous Integration, and CD stands for Continuous Delivery/Deployment. It is an important part of DevOps. CI/CD is an approach that deals with automation and monitoring at the different stages of an application life cycle. This authorizes development teams to accelerate software release cycles with increased reliability and security.

When changes are made in the code repository, a CI/CD pipeline is triggered to execute and perform various automated tasks. It tries to search for the “Congratulations” word in the file in the code repository. If it finds the word, then the status of the pipeline changes to “Passed”; otherwise, it changes to “Failed.

Steps for AWS using CodeBuild

1. First, create an S3 bucket to host a static site, enable the hosting for the bucket, and allow public access to reading it.
2. Next, create CI/CD in the AWS code pipeline, create a pipeline with a new name, and connect with GitHub.
3. Now, select the build provider to use—namely, AWS CodeBuild, and create a CodeBuild project.

AWS manages complete CI services that build source code, run tests, and produce software packages that are ready for deployment. It creates a build server dynamically. The CodeBuild also builds and tests code that we may deploy later.

The illustration (taken from AWS official site) given below shows the workflow of the CodeBuild.

Why do we use CodeBuild?

We do not need to provide, scale, and manage our build servers with the help of CodeBuild. We only need to define the source code location and select the build setting. CodeBuild will run the build scripts to compile, test, and package the source code.

Use cases

These are some use cases of CodeBuild:

• It automates the continuous integration and delivers (CI/CD) the pipeline.
• It removes the complexity of handling build servers.
• It builds source code that is hosted on GitHub.