Building software with consistent quality and being able to deliver new functionality quickly isn’t easy! But by using DevOps as an agile development process and the right development tools, you can make it super easy!! In this blog, we will discuss AWS Developer tools which are playing a key role in CI/CD approach.
In this blog, we will cover:
- What is DevOps?
- What is CI/CD?
- Components of a CI/CD Pipeline
- Implementing CI/CD using AWS development tools
- AWS CodeCommit
- CodeBuild
- CodeDeploy
- CodePipeline
- Benefits of CI/CD
- When is CI/CD not feasible?
- Best Practices of CI/CD
- Litmus tests to see if your team really practices CI/CD
What is DevOps?
DevOps is an agile development process and mindset that uses agile principles including collaboration, communication, and utilizing the right tools to streamline software building, testing, and release. In our previous blog, we discussed DevOps in detail. If you have missed reading our DevOps blog, here is the link.
How to become a successful AWS DevOps Engineer?
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD stands for the combined practices of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). It is a DevOps tactic, which makes use of the right automated testing tools to implement agile development where a commit or change to code passes through various automated stage gates, all the way from building and testing to deploying applications, from development to production environments.
“DevOps channels the entire process right from the idea on a whiteboard until the real product is in the customer’s hands through automated pipelines(CI/CD).”
Components of a CI/CD Pipeline
A typical CI/CD pipeline must include these phases:
- Build phase
- Testing phase
- Deploy phase
- Automated testing phase
- Deploy to the production phase
In such a pipeline, things started with the developer team writing the initial lines of code. The developers then commit these codes into a version control system, which is the first phase of the pipeline.
As a linear workflow, the developers will commit new codes and push them to the version control system with an updated version tag.
Implementing CI/CD using AWS development tools
AWS provides a set of developer tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline) that can be used to achieve DevOps CI/CD in a fully-secured, scalable, maintainable, and easy integration environment with existing CI/CD tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Terraform, etc.
Benefits of CI/CD
If your company practices CI/CD, it will have a competitive advantage that enables you to:
Deliver software with less risk – CI/CD pipelines standardize release processes across projects. By testing every change in source code, there are fewer chances of new bugs.
Release new features more frequently – A CI/CD pipeline can visualize your entire path from commit to production in a single screen. You can navigate across stages, spot inefficiencies, and optimize your process. This process allows you to remove the roadblocks to productivity
Deliver the product that clients need. Delivering updates often leads to more client feedback. You can take advantage of that by testing early versions of products with clients. This way you avoid investing too much in features that your customers don’t need, and focus on those that matter.
Improve developer productivity. Engineering teams that don’t practice CI/CD often work under stress as they know that they might get fired for bad deployments and hard-to-fix outages. On the other hand, CI/CD guides product management to optimize for user impact. Developers deploy code while it’s fresh in their minds. The result is a happy engineering team with high productivity.
When is CI/CD not feasible?
Proponents of CI/CD claim the benefits of accelerated time to market, improved developer productivity, reduced technical risk, improved quality, and improved customer satisfaction. But CI/CD implementation demands change in the company’s software development culture. If you are not realistic about the plan and your team is not ready to accept software development culture change, then it’s difficult to adopt CI/CD!
“Continuous Delivery is great but won’t work with my project.”
There are indeed some cases when CI/CD may not be a suitable approach, like regulations restricting how software can be updated. For example, continuously updating software used in aerospace, telecom, and medical industries is not an option.
Best Practices of CI/CD
The following are some best practice dos and don’ts for CI/CD.
Do’s:
- Treat your infrastructure as code
- Use version control for your infrastructure code.
- Make use of bug tracking and ticketing systems.
- Manage project with an integrated team of maximum 10 self-sustaining members
- Have all developers commit code to the main trunk frequently, with no long-running feature branches.
- Adopt a build system across your organization and standardize builds.
- Ensure that unit tests are up-to-date and not neglected.
- Establish role-based security controls like who can do what and when
- Keep track of standard metrics
- Number of builds and deployments
- Average time for changes to reach production and build time
- Use multiple distinct pipelines for each branch and team.
Dont’s:
- Have long-running branches with large complicated merges
- Have manual testing processes
- Have manual approval processes, code reviews, and security reviews.
Litmus tests to see if your team really practices CI/CD
Test 1 – Do you need to inform your end-users that you are having a service break because you are doing the update? If yes, then definitely you are not practicing CI/CD
Test 2 – If your developer team can stop what they’re doing right now and ship the current development version of code to production in 30 minutes or less without anyone stressing about what could happen – congratulations, you’re practicing CI/CD!
Conclusion
In this blog, you have seen how easily we can set up and manage an entire CI/CD pipeline in AWS accounts using the native AWS suite of CI/CD services, where a commit or change to code passes through various automated stage gates all the way from building and testing to deploying applications, from development to production environments.
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