Automated Code Deployment on AWS using CodePipeline

 

How To Automate Code Deployment on AWS using CodePipeline, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CloudWatch :

Despite high competition, AWS has continued its stronghold on the cloud market till now. New services are continuously added, resulting in improved and high performance. And while AWS tries to keep things simple for developers, using the platform isn’t always easy. Especially for a big organization.

For this reason, AWS provides multiple tools to help AWS developers utilize and develop with its cloud platform and services. Let’s take a look at such tools that can help you build applications with AWS.

Developer Tools Offered By AWS Used In Case Study

The developing tool in Amazon Web Services helps their users/customers to get the software to deliver safely. It also modifies the developers and IT operations to make the service outcome even better. This helps to build, test, and deploy the application to AWS or the required destination. This tool helps the user to monitor, store, and provide surveillance to the application source code. you’ll be able to use AWS CodePipeline to orchestrate associate degree end-to-end computer code advancement using these services and third-party tools or integrate every service severally along with your existing tools.

AWS CodeCommit – It is a  fully-managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. CodeCommit makes it easy for teams to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem.

AWS CodeBuild – A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests and produces software packages that are ready to deploy, on a dynamically created build server.

AWS CodeDeploy – A fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of computing services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers.

AWS CodePipeline – A fully configured continuous delivery service that helps the user to automate their released pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.

Base Scenario (Use Case)

For this scenario, we will use CodePipeline to deploy code maintained in a CodeCommit repository to a single Amazon EC2 instance. Your pipeline is triggered when you push a change to the CodeCommit repository. The pipeline deploys your changes to an Amazon EC2 instance using CodeDeploy as the deployment service.

The pipeline has two stages:

• A source stage (Source) for your CodeCommit source action.
• A deployment stage (Deploy) for your CodeDeploy deployment action.

Steps To Deploy AWS CodePipeline Using AWS Developer Tools

1. If you don’t have a FREE AWS account, then create one from here Step by Step AWS FREE Tier Account
2. Use the region US East Ohio (us-east-2) for this
3. Download the HTTPS Git credentials for AWS CodeCommit using the IAM console
4. Create a CodeCommit Repository
5. Add Sample Code to your CodeCommit Repository
6. Create Amazon EC2 Windows instances and install the CodeDeploy agent
7. Create an application in CodeDeploy
8. Create your first pipeline in CodePipeline
9. Modify Code in your CodeCommit Repository
10. Verify your Pipeline Ran Successfully

Step 1: Download the HTTPS Git credentials for AWS CodeCommit using the IAM console

1) Click on users from the left menu and click on your user then click on security credentials Scroll down to HTTPS Git credentials for AWS CodeCommit and click on Generate Credential

. 

Step 2: Create a CodeCommit Repository

1) Open the Amazon Codecommit console and choose to Create repository.

2) On the Create repository page, in Repository name, enter a name for your repository (for example, K21repo). Then Choose Create.

3) On the next screen, click on Copy next to Step3: Clone the Repository (We’ll use this to clone this blank repository in the next step).

Step:3 Add Sample Code to your CodeCommit Repository

1) Run the following command to clone the repository, replacing the GIT Clone Address with the one you copied in the earlier step.
git clone <GIT Clone Address> then enter the username and password for IAM users HTTPS Git Credentials that we already downloaded

After that, it will show you a warning message that you cloned an empty repository but it’s ok

2) Next, download the sample code and save it in which we created our local repository. Unzip the files from SampleApp_Linux.zip into the local directory you created earlier (for example, /tmp/MyDemoRepo).
–> Deploy to Amazon Linux instances using CodeDeploy, download the sample application here: SampleApp_Linux.zip.

3) Open Command Prompt and make sure you are in the SampleApp_Linux folder
Run the following commands to stage all your files at once and commit the files with a commit message:
git add -A
git commit -m “Add sample application files”
git push

4) The files you downloaded and added to your local repo have now been added to the master branch in your CodeCommit K21Repo repository and are ready to be included in a pipeline.

Step 4: Create Amazon EC2 Windows instances and install the CodeDeploy agent

1) Create an IAM role that will be required to grant permission to the EC2 instance. Select the policy named AmazonEC2RoleforAWSCodeDeploy to create.

2) Launch the instance on which our code will be deployed. To know more about how to launch an EC2 instance check our Blog on EC2 Instance. Just remember to add the IAM role that we have created and In Auto-assign Public IP, choose Enable.
Expand Advanced Details, and in User data, As text selected, enter the following:
#!/bin/bash
yum -y update
yum install -y ruby
yum install -y aws-cli
cd /home/ec2-user
aws s3 cp s3://aws-codedeploy-us-east-2/latest/install . –region us-east-2
chmod +x ./install
./install auto

4)On Configure Security Group page, do the following:
• Next to Assign a security group, choose to create a new security group.
• In the row for SSH, under Source, choose Anywhere.
• Choose Add Rule, choose HTTP, and then under Source, choose Anywhere.

Leave rest settings default and click on Launch

Step 5: Create an application in CodeDeploy

1) Create an AWSCodeDeployRole that allows CodeDeploy to perform deployments

2) Initially click on create an application in CodeDeploy, and In Compute Platform, choose EC2/On-premises.Choose to Create application.

3) On the page that displays your application, choose to Create a deployment group. In service, role creates an IAM role under code deploy category.

4) Under Deployment type, choose In-place. Under the Environment configuration, choose Amazon EC2 Instances.

5) Under Deployment configuration, choose CodeDeployDefault.OneAtaTime. Under Load Balancer, clear Enable load balancing, leave the defaults then choose to Create a deployment group.

Step 6: Create your first pipeline in CodePipeline

1) Open the CodePipeline console. Choose pipeline settings, Enter your desired name and in the Service role, Choose New service role to allow CodePipeline to create a new service role in IAM.  To know more about AWS IAM refer to our blog on AWS Identity And Access Management (IAM).

2) In the Add source stage, select Source provider, choose Amazon S3. Under the S3 object key, enter the object key with or without a file path, and remember to include the file extension.

3) In the Add build stage, choose to Skip build stage, and then accept the warning message by choosing Skip again. Choose Next.

4) In the Add deploy stage, in Deploy provider, choose AWS CodeDeploy.Then enter your application name or choose the application name from the list. In the Deployment group, enter MyDemoDeploymentGroup, or choose it from the list, and then choose Next.

5) In Step 5: Review, review the information, and then choose Create pipeline. The pipeline starts running after it is created. It downloads the code from your CodeCommit repository and creates a CodeDeploy deployment to your EC2 instance.

Congratulations! You just created a simple pipeline in CodePipeline.
you can verify that by coping EC2 Public DNS address and then past it into the address bar of your web browser

Step 7: Modify Code in your CodeCommit Repository

1) In your CodeCommit repository revise the contents of the index.html file to change the background color and some of the text on the webpage, by clicking on edit

2) Under Author name enter K21,  then enter Email Address, Click on Commit changes

Step 8: Verify your Pipeline Ran Successfully

1) View the initial progress of the pipeline. The status of each stage changes from No executions yet to In Progress, and then to Succeeded. The running of the pipeline should be complete within a few minutes.

2) After Succeeded is displayed for the action status, refresh the demo page you accessed earlier in your browser.

 

How To Deploy Web App From S3 Bucket To EC2 Instance on AWS Using CodePipeline :

In this post, we are going to cover the case study to deploy a web application from an S3 bucket to an EC2 instance using AWS CodePipeline which is a part of CI/CD DevOps practices.

Topics, we’ll cover :

• Overview of CI/CD
• CI/CD Tools Offered By AWS
• Steps To Deploy Web Application On AWS

Before deploying a web application we should understand the basic concept of Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Deployment(CD) what are they and What kind of tools are offered by AWS for DevOps CI/CD practices.

Overview Of CI/CD

Continuous Integration(CI) and Continous Deployment(CD) gets rid of the traditional manual gate and implements fully automated verification of the acceptance environment to determine the scenario whether the pipeline can continue to production or not.

Continuous Integration focuses on the software development life cycle (SDLC) of the individual developer in the code repository. This can be executed multiple times with a primary goal to enable early detection of integration bugs, and errors.

Continuous Delivery focuses on automated code deployment in testing or production environment, taking the approval of updates to achieve automated software release process, pre-emptively discovering deployment issues.

CI/CD Tools Offered By AWS Used In Case Study

AWS offers an end-to-end CI/CD stack comprised of the following four services:

AWS CodeCommit – It is a  fully-managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. CodeCommit makes it easy for teams to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem.

AWS CodeBuild – A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests and produces software packages that are ready to deploy, on a dynamically created build server.

AWS CodeDeploy – A fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of computing services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers.

AWS CodePipeline – A fully configured continuous delivery service that helps the user to automate their released pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.

Typically in many organizations, there are many tools for code repository but we are using AWS S3 as a code repository.

Steps To Deploy Web Application Using AWS CodePipeline

We will be performing 4 steps to deploy a web application

Step 1: Create an S3 bucket for your application

1) Open the Amazon S3 console and Choose Create bucket and In Bucket name, enter a name for your bucket, and also don’t forget to enable Versioning.

2) Next, download the sample code and save it into a folder or directory on your local computer.
Choose one of the following. Choose SampleApp_Windows.zip if you want to follow the steps in this tutorial for Windows Server instances. (Do not Unzip the file while Uploading)
–> If you want to deploy to Amazon Linux instances using CodeDeploy, download the sample application here: SampleApp_Linux.zip.
–> If you want to deploy to Windows Server instances using CodeDeploy, download the sample application here: SampleApp_Windows.zip.

3) In the S3 console, Upload code in the bucket you created.

To Know More  About Blue-Green Deployment

Step 2: Create Amazon EC2 Windows instances and install the CodeDeploy agent

1) Create an IAM role that will be required to grant permission to EC2 instance. Select the policy named AmazonEC2RoleforAWSCodeDeploy to create.

2) Launch instance on which our code will be deployed.

3) Just remember to add the IAM role that we have created. and In Auto-assign Public IP, choose Enable. Expand Advanced Details, and in User data, As text selected, enter the following:
<powershell>
New-Item -Path c:\temp -ItemType “directory” -Force
powershell.exe -Command Read-S3Object -BucketName bucket-name/latest -Key codedeploy-agent.msi -File c:\temp\codedeploy-agent.msi
Start-Process -Wait -FilePath c:\temp\codedeploy-agent.msi -WindowStyle Hidden
</powershell>

Note: bucket-name is the name of the S3 bucket that contains the CodeDeploy Resource Kit files for your region. For example, for the US West (Oregon) Region, replace the bucket-name with AWS-code deploy-us-west-2. For a list of bucket names, see Resource Kit Bucket Names by Region.

4) On the Configure Security Group page, allow port 80 communication so you can access the public instance endpoint. Then follow the default configuration and launch the instance

Step 3: Create an application in CodeDeploy

1) Initially create an application in CodeDeploy, and In Compute Platform, choose EC2/On-premises.Choose to Create application.

2) On the page that displays your application, choose to Create a deployment group. In service, role creates an IAM role under code deploy category. Under Deployment type, choose In-place.

3) Under Environment configuration, choose Amazon EC2 Instances.

4) Under Deployment configuration, choose CodeDeployDefault.OneAtaTime.

5) Under Load Balancer, clear Enable load balancing, leave the defaults then choose to Create a deployment group.

Step 4: Create your first pipeline in CodePipeline

1) Open the CodePipeline console. Choose pipeline settings, Enter your desired name and in Service role, Choose New service role to allow CodePipeline to create a new service role in IAM.  To know more about AWS IAM refer to our blog on AWS Identity And Access Management (IAM).

2) In the Add source stage, select Source provider, choose Amazon S3. Under the S3 object key, enter the object key with or without a file path, and remember to include the file extension.

3) In the Add build stage, choose to Skip build stage, and then accept the warning message by choosing Skip again. Choose Next.

4) In the Add deploy stage, in Deploy provider, choose AWS CodeDeploy.Then enter your application name or choose the application name from the list. In the Deployment group, enter MyDemoDeploymentGroup, or choose it from the list, and then choose Next.

Congratulations! You just created a simple pipeline in CodePipeline. you can verify that by coping EC2 Public DNS address and then past it into the address bar of your web browser

AWS CodeCommit overview

 

AWS CodeCommit Overview & It’s Benefits :

DevOps is a popular culture and AWS being a popular cloud provider and both are in demand. So how to implement DevOps on AWS?

AWS responded to this with a set of services that ensured one could carry out the process of continuous and integration and continuous deployment on the cloud and one of those services is AWS CodeCommit.

In this post, we will discuss AWS CodeCommit in detail. We will discuss:

• Overview Of AWS CodeCommit
• Benefits Of AWS CodeCommit 
• Working Of AWS CodeCommit
• Creating AWS CodeCommit Repository
• Branches 
• Benefits Of Branches
• Pricing OF AWS CodeCommit

So let’s get started with AWS CodeCommit.

Overview Of AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a version control service hosted by Amazon  Web Services (AWS) that you can use to privately store and manage assets such as documents, source code, and binary files. It is an in-house repository or infrastructure that lets you host or hold repositories. AWS CodeCommit basically gives you an environment where you can actually go ahead commit your code, code push it, or pull it.

AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that hosts your secure Git-based repositories. It makes it easy for groups to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. CodeCommit securely stores anything from source code to binaries, and it runs seamlessly with your existing Git tools.

Benefits Of AWS CodeCommit

• Store any type of Code: AWS CodeCommit lets you store any type of code as there are very fewer restrictions on the type and the extensions of the code that you store.
• Fully Managed:  AWS CodeCommit eliminates the need to host, maintain, back up, and scale your own source control servers. The service automatically scales to meet the growing needs of your project.
• Highly Secure: Security is something which you don’t need to worry about with AWS Code Commit., like the code, you push or pull is encrypted. CodeCommit is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allowing you to customize user-specific access to your repositories.
• Ensures Collaborative Work: AWS CodeCommit helps you collaborate on code with teammates via pull requests, branching and merging, and you can give proper access to people who can access this piece of code, make changes to it and under different IAM users and under different security groups this process becomes very much engaging and collaborative.
• Faster development lifecycle: AWS CodeCommit keeps your repositories close to your build, staging, and production environments in the AWS cloud. You can transfer incremental changes instead of the entire application. This allows you to increase the speed and frequency of your development lifecycle.
• Scale Easily: When you talk about cloud platforms and any service, it ensures scalability so does the amount of code you push on this particular service.
• Integrate with third-party tools: The best thing about AWS CodeCommit is that it places your code in such locations that it becomes very easy to integrate with your third-party tools. You can keep using your preferred development environment plugins, continuous integration/continuous delivery systems, and graphical clients with CodeCommit.

Before creating an AWS CodeCommit Repository lets check its working first.

Working Of AWS Code Commit

Creating AWS Code Commit Repository

1)Log in to your AWS account 

2) Search for CodeCommit and Open it.

3) In the region selector, choose the AWS Region where you want to create the repository.

US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore) Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), South America (São Paulo), Middle East (Bahrain), Canada (Central), China (Beijing), China (Ningxia), AWS GovCloud (US-West), AWS GovCloud (US-East)

4) Click on Create Repository.

5) Give your repository a name and then click on Create

6) CodeCommit Repository will be created.

What are the Branches?

Branches are simply pointers or references to a commit. In development, they’re a convenient way to organize your work. You can use branches to separate work on a new or different version of files without impacting work in other branches. You can use branches to develop new features, store a specific version of your project from a particular commit, and more.

Benefits Of Branches

• A convenient way to organize your work by using branches to separate work impacting work in other branches
• Used for developing new features, storing a specific version of the project from a particular commit
• In CodeCommit, one can change the default branch for your repository.
• The default branch is the one used as the base or default branch in local repositories when users clone the repository.
• Creating, deleting, and viewing branch details is possible in Codecommit.

Pricing Of AWS CodeCommit

With an AWS account, anyone can get started with AWS CodeCommit for free. Your account gets 5 active users per month for free (within limits), after which you pay $1.00 per additional active user per month. There are no upfront fees or commitments.

This AWS free tier offer for AWS CodeCommit is available to both new and existing AWS customers indefinitely and does not expire at the end of the standard 12 months free tier term.

AWS Cloud Formation

Introduction to AWS CloudFormation:

A good example of how the DevOps principles are used in practice is AWS CloudFormation. CloudFormation provides a common language for you to design and provision AWS and third-party application resources in your cloud environment.

CloudFormation allows you to use programming languages or a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This gives you a single source of truth for your AWS and third-party resources. CloudFormation makes it easy to organize and deploy a collection of AWS resources and lets you describe any dependencies or pass in special parameters when the stack is configured.

What Is AWS CloudFormation?

• Building Blocks: It is a language that gives you building blocks to describe the infrastructure you want to provision in AWS.
• Text files: Containing the description that is formatted in JSON and YAML. In this, you can version it and track changes like any other piece of code.
• Free: It is free you can only pay for the infrastructure that is created by it.

Benefits Of Using CloudFormation:

1. Model Complete Infrastructure: CloudFormation enables you to model your entire infrastructure and application resources with either a text file or programming language. CloudFormation CLI and Registry make it easy to manage third party resources with CloudFormation. CloudFormation provides a single source of truth for all your resources and helps you to standardize infrastructure components used across your organization, enabling configuration compliance and faster troubleshooting.
2. Automate & deploy: CloudFormation provisions your application resources in a safe, repeatable manner, allowing you to build and rebuild your applications and infrastructure, without having to perform manual actions or write custom scripts. CloudFormation takes administration of determining the right operations to perform when managing your stack, orchestrating them most efficiently, and rolls back changes automatically if errors are detected.
3. CloudFormation at Core: CloudFormation is just code. Codifying your infrastructure enables you to treat your infrastructure as just code. You can write it with any code editor, check it into a version control system, and review the files with team members before deploying it into production.

Key Terminology Regarding AWS CloudFormation?

• CloudFormation Stack: A collection of AWS resources that you manage as a single unit. The stack is created when you give the CloudFormation service your template.

• CloudFormation Template: The documents that describe how to act and what to create. It is the text that you write that CloudFormation uses to provision infrastructure. A template can be used to both create and update a stack.
  E.g of Template:
  

How AWS CloudFormation Works?

Example Of CloudFormation Architecture

By using CloudFormation templates, you can able to define and model AWS resources that can be created and updated. These templates are written in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Each template requires a specific syntax and structure that depends on the types of resources being created and managed. By using templates, you can provision infrastructure in a repeatable and reliable way.

You can create custom CloudFormation templates or use sample templates that are available publicly. Once templates are deployed or updated into the AWS environment, the collection of resources under management is called a “stack.” You can able to manage stacks through the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation APIs, or AWS Command Line Interface. Common actions include create-stack, describe-stacks, list-stacks, and update-stack.

When you create or update a stack in the console, events are displayed showing the status of the configuration. If an error occurs, the stack is rolled back to its previous state. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) helps you manage these events. For example, you can use Amazon SNS to track stack creation and deletion progress via email and integrate with other processes programmatically.

With templates, you can work with a broad set of AWS offerings, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Identity and Access Management, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

When And Where To Use AWS CloudFormation?

• When you have to deploy infrastructure rather than doing it manually.
• To create a repeatable patterned environment, e.g. a WordPress blog and a database if you were running a web hosting business.
• To run automated testing for CI/CD environments. Create a dedicated, clean environment, inject your code, run testing, produce results, then delete the test environment, all with no human input.
• To define an environment all at once, and have it deployed to any region in the AWS Cloud without reconfiguration.
• To manage infrastructure configuration using software development style versioning and code repositories such as git.

Azure container Apps

CONTAINER APPS :

Containerization services in Azure

• Azure Container Instances (ACI): This service is useful when you need to execute a single container in an isolated environment. ACI supports both Windows and Linux containers and can start in a matter of seconds. Use cases include running a build server or bursting in the context of an AKS cluster.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): ACI provides no scaling nor load balancing functionalities. If you need these, then AKS is likely to better suit your needs. With AKS, you get a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure, and you can access it and control it through the standard Kubernetes CLI commands.
• Azure Container Registry (ACR): this service gives you the ability to create a private registry for your container images and only give access to select users and groups (within your organization, for example). ACR also has a feature called “tasks” which can be leveraged in the context of image scanning and hardening.
• Azure Service Fabric: somewhat similar to AKS but the underlying orchestrator is proprietary.

Benefits of Azure Container Apps

Since ACA is a serverless offering, it will scale your applications automatically to meet the demand. Scaling can go from zero up to the maximum of replicas defined during the creation of the ACA instance. If no events (i.e., HTTP requests, messages in a Service Bus queue, …) are sent to our ACA instance then no pod is running which means that no cost is incurred.

The second benefit of ACA is the ability to execute multiple revisions (i.e., versions) of the same container in parallel. It can be useful for canary testing scenarios, and you can even redirect traffic between revisions.

A third benefit is that the load is automatically balanced across available replicas.

A fourth benefit is an availability, out-of-the-box, of the Dapr runtime, since Dapr is becoming more and more popular when it comes to building microservices applications.

There are also other benefits provided by ACA, such as the ability to manage application secrets from the application, the ability to monitor application logs centrally from Azure Log Analytics (which seems trivial but is very interesting especially in a microservices architecture where all microservices logs are aggregated into the same Log Analytics instance which greatly simplifies monitoring and debugging). There’s also the ability to execute containers from any registry (Docker Hub, ACR, …).

Limitations of Azure Container Apps

One limitation that we noticed, and that is worth mentioning here, is that ACA doesn’t allow you to manage the cluster using Kubernetes CLI commands (or any commands at all). Since ACA is a serverless offering, it makes total sense that you don’t have access to the underlying infrastructure and hence you can’t manage it yourself (that’s what serverless offerings are all about, right?). It makes sense but it is worth mentioning. Thus, if managing the Kubernetes cluster is what you need, then ACA is not the right service for you. You should instead consider AKS.