Cloud Computing Intermediate to Advanced +200 XP

AWS DevOps Services

AWS Native CI/CD Ecosystem: Pipelines & Artifacts

Deploying reliable applications in the cloud requires automated release pipelines. The native **AWS DevOps Suite** decouples building, testing, and deployment stages into dedicated cloud microservices:

CI/CD Core Components:
  • AWS CodePipeline: The orchestrator that listens to source code changes (e.g. GitHub, CodeCommit) and triggers downstream actions in sequence.
  • AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed compilation server that runs inside temporary Docker containers, executing custom commands defined in a buildspec.yml file.
  • AWS CodeDeploy: An advanced agent-based deployment server that manages zero-downtime rollouts onto EC2 instances or ECS containers.
  • Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry): A highly secure Docker registry integrated with IAM to authenticate and store container images.

Advanced Release Strategies: Blue-Green vs Canary Rollouts

To avoid outages, production deploys must use zero-downtime patterns instead of raw in-place updates. Here are the two industry-standard cloud rollout methodologies:

**Blue-Green Deployment** provisions a completely separate clone of your environment (Green) running the new version. Once tested, the load balancer flips 100% of traffic from the old (Blue) to the new environment instantly. **Canary Rollouts** slowly route a tiny fraction (e.g. 10%) of traffic to the new version. If error logs remain clean, the canary percentage increases incrementally until the rollout reaches 100%.

Interactive Pipeline: Canary Release Automation Flow

Observe how AWS CodeDeploy and Route 53 automate a canary deployment. The pipeline shifts a sliver of traffic to the new version, triggers CloudWatch metric alarms, and automatically rolls back if latency spikes or HTTP 5xx errors occur.

Pipeline R: Continuous Delivery (Canary)

Source
Git Commit
Triggers CodePipeline
Build
Docker Compile
CodeBuild pushes to ECR
Canary
Shift 10% Traffic
ALB weights route to Canary
Complete
100% Promoted
Terminates old instances

Boilerplate buildspec.yml Configuration File

Below is the exact `buildspec.yml` used by AWS CodeBuild to compile a Docker container, tag it with the git commit hash, authenticate via IAM to ECR, and push the artifact:

version: 0.2
phases:
  pre_build:
    commands:
      - echo Logging in to Amazon ECR...
      - aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
      - COMMIT_HASH=$(echo $CODEBUILD_RESOLVED_SOURCE_VERSION | cut -c 1-7)
      - IMAGE_TAG=${COMMIT_HASH:-latest}
  build:
    commands:
      - echo Build started on `date`
      - echo Building the Docker image...
      - docker build -t company-app:$IMAGE_TAG .
      - docker tag company-app:$IMAGE_TAG 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/company-app:$IMAGE_TAG
  post_build:
    commands:
      - echo Build completed on `date`
      - echo Pushing the Docker image...
      - docker push 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/company-app:$IMAGE_TAG
artifacts:
  files:
    - appspec.yml