Businesses need to accelerate the delivery of applications and services to improve customer experience and gain a competitive advantage. The traditional waterfall development method is slow because of which DevOps services has gained popularity. This enables businesses to shorten the product development lifecycle and update products faster.

Starling Bank is a UK-based mobile-only bank offering innovative, seamless financial services such as real-time payment visibility and contactless debit cards. The app is at the core of all its banking operations, connecting customers to the bank and enabling them to conduct transactions without glitches. Therefore, ensuring that it works every time was very essential for the bank.

The company used AWS continuous integration/continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) with the DevOps approach to enable fast testing and scaling capabilities. This enabled Starling to address any bugs before they could impact customers.

CI/CD solutions is integral to the DevOps work environment. It automates the complete workflow of updating software or application from the time of building to testing, packaging, and deploying. In other words, CI/CD is a pipeline a new code is created on one end, tested as it progresses through the stages of source, build, test, staging, and production, and then moved to the production environment.

Benefits of a CI/CD Pipeline

Using a CI/CD pipeline enables the frequent release of new features and updates based on inputs from monitoring the app’s performance and feedback from customers. It reduces the risk of errors due to human intervention by automating the process. A structured, automated process also improves productivity. Using a microservices approach helps with releasing components independent of each other.

The second advantage is improving the code’s quality since, at each stage of the CI/CD pipeline, the code is tested and verified. Whenever a problem is identified, the code does not progress and is sent back for debugging to the team.

This article might give you an extended list of benefits of implementing CI/CD solutions: CI/CD- The Advantage You Didn’t Know You Needed

Use Cases of CI/CD Workflows in AWS

Some of the production-ready CI/CD services on AWS include:

Deploying Dockerized Microservices: It is easy to industrialize dockerized microservices with the AWS architecture.

Serverless Functions: A highly resilient and fault-tolerant CI/CD pipeline can be set up for automating the deployment process of Lambda-based serverless applications.

Machine Learning Pipelines: Machine learning models can be developed, trained, tested, deployed, managed, and monitored in AWS in a cloud-based environment.

AWS Developer Tools to Create Scalable CI/CD Pipelines

Amazon Web Server (AWS) provides CI/CD developers with tools for accelerating software development and shortening release cycles. These flexible services enable a scalable CI/CD pipeline by

• (i).Simplifying provisioning and infrastructure management
• (ii).Deploying application code
• (iii).Automating the processes for software release
• (iv).Monitoring the performance of the application and the infrastructure

The scalable developer tools for CI/CD pipelines include:

CodePipeline: This helps to automate the building, testing, and deploying stages of the release process whenever a code needs a change. It uses a defined release model that facilitates delivering features and updates rapidly and reliably. The code pipelines can also integrate with other services such as AWS Services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and third-party products such as GitHub. Some of the use cases that AWS CodePipeline can address include:

(i).Code compilation, building, and testing using AWS CodeBuild

(ii).Delivering container-based applications continuously to the cloud

(ii).Validation of artifacts, including descriptors and container images, that are for network service or functions specific to cloud-native network pre-deployment

(iii).Testing functionality, performance, baseline, regression and integration for containerized network function/virtual network function (CNF/VNF)

(v).Testing for reliability and disaster recovery (DR)

CodeCommit: CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service hosting secure repositories based on Git. It provides a secure and highly scalable ecosystem that facilitates collaboration on code. This solution uses CodeCommit to create a warehouse to store the application and deployment codes.

CodeBuild: CodeBuild can be used to build and test the code in a fully managed continuous integration service. The source code is compiled, tested, and ready-to-deploy software packages are deployed on a build server that is created dynamically.

CodeDeploy – The code or application is deployed onto a set of EC2 instances by a fully managed deployment service that uses CodeDeploy. It runs CodeDeploy agents to automate software deployments to several compute services, including Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, or even on-premises servers.

CodePipeline: Quick and reliable update of application and infrastructure is made possible by a fully managed continuous delivery service that automates the release pipelines. To build an end-to-end pipeline, it leverages CodePipeline to fetch the application code from CodeCommit, build and test using CodeBuild, and deploy using CodeDeploy.

CloudWatch Events: The CodePipeline on Git is triggered by an AWS CloudWatch Events rule to commit to the repository on CodeCommit.

A must read: Using Kubernetes to Run CI/CD Pipelines in Large-scale, Cloud-native Applications

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): Objects can be stored in this industry-leading scalable storage service that ensures data availability, performance, and security. S3 buckets are used for storing the build and deployment artifacts that were created during the pipeline run.

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS): Cryptographic keys can be created easily using AWS KMS. It also allows easy management and control of their use across several AWS services and applications. The build and deployment artifacts in the S3 bucket are also encrypted at rest.

Indium–AWS Partner

Indium Software is an AWS partner with long years of experience in DevOps and CI/CD.  Our team of AWS experts leverages its set of pre-fabricated toolsets to break barriers to innovation and enable agile development of applications and software. We have cross-domain expertise, which helps us to understand the use cases and design and build software with assured outcomes. We have a proven track record, with more than 250 deployments of CI/CD deployments in AWS, in aligning business strategic goals with cloud platform capabilities.

Our AWS capabilities span consulting, system integration, and industry solutions, as we empower our clients to speed up their digital transformation journey.