AWS CodeCommit + Creating a CI/CD pipeline

 

Having signed up to the AWS Skill Builder I thought it was something I'd be looking at post-programme. However the above builder labs email landed, I thought, what better way to spend my Sunday afternoon?


So the fundamentals lab was working with the AWS service CodeCommit. Having gone through most of gitimmersion this lab felt very straight forward. It involved creating a local and "remote" (ie. CloudCommit) git repository and synchronising them together.


The intermediate lab now proved a little more tricky. First of all was to comprehend that we were going to build a CI/CD pipeline - ie. manifesting the principles of DevOps. Below I've posted a full scale CI/CD pipeline to demonstrate the complexity.




However, in this lab we're only using CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, AWS ECR and ECS. This lab involved the most complex technology stack I've come across thus far, so really appreciated doing something a little more challenging. However, it did involve some persistence on my part as on the third attempt, I was pretty sure everything had been actioned properly. However at the point of creating my pipeline, I had a IAM error - turns out I was able to start the lab despite the fundamental labs still not formally ended. Lesson learnt! 


After the initial struggle things went well. It was my first real exposure to containers and Docker in particular. This pipeline emulates what is called a blue/green deployment (thus the colours of the 'Application' above) where we want to push an update to a live system. It was good to see the files used to automate this process as it provided me some genuine illumination as to how the details work in practice. Unfortunately, due to the unexpected errors, this lab took a little more time then I had hoped as I had intended to also attempt the advanced lab today. But for rest, I've got videos to learn about ITIL instead. I hope by next weekend this advanced lab is done and I'll start on some BASH scripting. Because why delay the inevitable 😁.

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