AWS CodeBuild

The recent move of our CI/CD tooling to AWS CodeBuild / AWS CodeDeploy (with GitHub ) as well as moving to Amazon EC2 Container Service / AWS Lambda for our deployment architecture for most of our services has helped us significantly reduce our deployment times while improving both feature velocity and overall reliability. In one extreme case, we got one service down from 90 minutes to a very reasonable 15 minutes. Container-based build and deployments have made so many things simpler and easier and the integration between the tools has been helpful. There is still some work to do on our service mesh & API proxy approach to further simplify our environment.

I'm building a cloud hosted web UI and API so I'm using a lot of @AWS services like AWS CodeBuild for building, hosting and deploying components. I still use GitHub for source control and Trello for tracking the work but we're not big enough yet for these to be issues. I find having all the functional stuff in one place simplifies access, organisation and budgeting.

If your product is going to run in the cloud then I recommend making use of the features available from your chosen provider. All the big providers have pipelines that span everything from source control though to deployment and this can reduce a lot of the friction you can experience putting it all together with different providers.

If you're not targeting a cloud platform then I think you'll have to do your homework as there are just too many variables. Basing your evaluation on a key principle like minimising friction or reducing costs is going to help.

Docker is used to package up our applications with all of the parts they need, such as libraries and other dependencies, and enable us to ship it all out as one package. Our repositories hosted in AWS CodeCommit are automatically built by AWS CodeBuild on changes (resulting from Pull Requests being approved) and these are stored in the the EC2 Container Registry (ECR) before being approved for deployment to the Amazon EC2 Container Service in a zero-downtime, staged upgrade. We also provide development instances of our Apps, which are also hosted in Docker containers.

At Volta we use AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to automatically ship new AWS Lambda services without any effort. And we do it all with AWS CloudFormation, since configuration is easier to maintain than code.