CI/CD allows changes to code to pass through various automated stage gates, all the way from building and testing to deploying applications – from development to production environments.
As experts in developing software that meets business needs while helping teams embrace DevOps, these are some of the most reliable AWS tools we utilise for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) in a DevOps environment.
Hand-in-hand, DevOps and CI/CD are a solution to the ‘integration hell’ experienced by development and operations teams when integrating code. CI/CD introduces automation and continuous monitoring into the full development lifecycle creating a streamlined movement of all new feature development all the way into production deployment.
This means engineers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. In this way, the development team pushes frequent code changes on the main branch while ensuring that it does not impact any changes made by development teams working in parallel. These connected practices are supported by development and operations teams working side by side with a DevOps culture.?
Rapid delivery and reliability are key benefits of DevOps
Perhaps the two most important benefits of DevOps are rapid delivery and reliability. Adopting this approach means increasing the frequency and pace of releases, so you can innovate and improve the product faster. The quicker new features are released, and bugs fixed, the faster you can respond to the client’s needs – attaining that all-important competitive advantage.
In terms of reliability, CI/CD allows you to test that each change made is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging?practices help you stay informed of performance in real time.
Simplify your development with tried and trusted AWS tools
Specifically for organisations and teams who have adopted DevOps, these tooling options aid companies in maintaining CI/CD, and demonstrate the types of tooling required to ensure successful delivery. They help securely store and version source code, and automatically build, test and deploy applications to your cloud or on-premise environment.
Continuous integration tools
- Bamboo?is a DevOps tool to help you practice Continuous Delivery. It gives the ability to tie automated builds, tests, and releases together into a single workflow. It can also be used to automate infrastructure as code pipelines to provision cloud resources
- Jenkins?is written in Java and is an open-source platform for continuous integration and continuous delivery that is used to automate your end-to-end release management lifecycle. Jenkins is the most popular open-source CI/CD tool on the market today and is used in support of DevOps, alongside other cloud native tools. Jenkins can even be deployed into AWS EKS clusters to automate the entire CI/CD process in a cloud-native fashion
- GitHub Actions?are?event-driven, meaning that you can run a series of commands after a specified event has occurred. For example, every time someone creates a pull request for a repository, you can automatically run a command that executes a software testing script. This can be used to automate deployments into your cloud environment. For example, updating image versions on AWS ECS tasks
- CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeploy (AWS):?CodeBuild builds, tests, and deploys code every time there is a code change, based on the defined release process models. AWS CodeDeploy belongs to the “Deployment as a Service” category of the tech stack allowing you to automate deployments and eliminate manual intervention, while AWS CodePipeline can be primarily classified under “Continuous Deployment” linking all of the steps in the build, test and deploy pipelines into configurable release processes that allow you to decide what, when and where releases occur
- TeamCity?is a CI server written in Java. It?allows engineers to integrate code, and is easy to configure with simple steps. On TeamCity parallel builds run simultaneously on different platforms and environments, including your cloud environments
- Bitbucket Pipelines?is an?integrated CI/CD service built into Bitbucket. It allows you to automatically build, test, and even deploy code based on a configuration file in your repository. Essentially, we use Bitbucket to create containers in the cloud for you
Continuous delivery tools
- UrbanCode Deploy?is?a tool for automating application deployments in the cloud. It is designed to facilitate rapid feedback and continuous delivery in Agile development while providing the audit trails, versioning and approvals needed in production
- ArgoCD?is a?declarative GitOps tool built to deploy applications to Kubernetes. It is purpose-built to deploy applications to Kubernetes so it doesn’t have the UI overhead of many tools built to deploy to multiple locations. It was also built with a GitOps flow in mind and can be used to manage workloads on AWS EKS
- Octopus deploy?makes it easy to automate your deployments and operations runbooks from a single place, helping you ship code faster, improve reliability, and break down silos in the ever-growing cloud-native world
- CodeDeploy?is?a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of computer services?such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to automate software deployments, eliminating the need for more error-prone manual operations
Coming together like butter on warm toast, DevOps and CI/CD enable organisations and development teams to streamline integration and automate deployment – a powerful combination that results in seamless and continuous delivery. If you’re interested in adopting a DevOps culture into your team or looking to harness the power of cloud computing,?reach out to us
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