AWS CodePipeline Pros and Cons

Codepipline is a bit under-rated, because most people don't have the need for such a programmable CD tool. Every facet of the build pipeline can be configured, and cans end notifier events via AWS SQS. When you're already doing much through AWS, it can reduce hassle to maintain all of your ops code in one place.

I haven't seen other CD tools have this much programmability — and even where they may, I still hesitate at have too many things in too many disparate places. Also, CodePipeline as a full command-line interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There really is nothing user-friendly about it, when you compare it to tools like CodeShip or Ansible. CodePipeline is a 'programmers tool' — and so it lacks the 'ease' of interacting with it, which other tools have. Consider that every functionality of CodePipeline has a command-line equivalent.

When I've built things for smaller shops, it would be too much to hand-off to less-skilled engineers. This is also the case in medium-size companies, where there are enough smart people to do big things, but not enough of them to 'retune the engine regularly.' Even in a company with ~100 engineers, the ops group was small enough that CodePipeline was a bit much to setup and maintain with a complex build that involved a large tree of dependencies. In that particularly case, GoCD provided more up-front UI. It really comes down to what kind of people you have.

As with most AWS products, support is costly or hard to come by (unless you in a city that has an AWS Loft) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As part of the tools provide by AWS for DevOps, Codepipeline enables a continuous delivery in the AWS cloud. It can be used to connect between continuous integration tools up to the deployment of your application. It handles all the step related to app lifecycle, i.e. test, build, and deploy. It first grapes your source code from a repository (on commits for instance this) by connecting to the corresponding repository, potentially launch a build/test step then deploy the artifacts to the production environment. It has a good level of security as an IAM role can be affected to the whole process which can guarantee the isolation of the whole process. Furthermore, it has an intuitive wizard that can help you quickly setup a CD environment for your application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's tied to AWS and cannot be used locally or on the infrastructure of any other cloud provider. It also still lacks a lot of integrations, for instance it supports a limited set of code source repositories, for the time being the application code can only be hosted on S3 or on github. Furthermore, the targets deploy can only be one of these options: Beanstak or CodeDeploy which both are Amazon services. Similarly, the build providers are limited to Jenkins and anther SaaS-based CI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What is nice about AWS is that there are a plenty of managed services that hide the complexity of their setup and more importantly scalability. One of these services is the CodePipeline which is a hosted Continuous Delivery (CD) service. It has a nice Web-based user interface that helps you in the modeling, visualisation and automatisation of the steps which are required for releasing any kind of applications (whether it is a simple one or a complex one with many moving parts).

In fact, with CodePipeline it is very easy to model the entire release process for building a code base, to deploy to the staging environments, to test the application, and finally to release it to the production platform. Then each time the code base changes, CodePipeline will automatically run the builds, tests, and deployment as modelled. Furthermore, Code Pipeline is an open service that can be integrated with third party tools or an owned custom systems this at any stage of the release process in order to make an end-to-end solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Code Pipeline is still a young service, unfortunately its not yet available in all regions (only available for the US). In addition, the application code repositories which are supported are still limited to Github and S3. Furthermore, there is a limit to the number of Code Pipeline that a given AWS user can be linked to (around 20 if this was no changed). The deploy stage in Code Pipeline is limited to the AWS infrastructure, i.e. if part of your applications are hosted in another Cloud provider then it will not be possible to automate everything from one Place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Coming from Jenkins, some serious features were needed to keep us on Codepipeline. One of them was the hosted deployment. For 1$ per active pipeline per month, it was a sweet deal. The service is highly scalable and deploys can be managed in auto scaling groups. Very easy to mirror pipelines. Application and pipeline change both can be deployed in a single commit. Codepipeline can be configured with IAM, to take actions on our behalf. Testing environments can be configured to only allow traffic from internal sources. It was very easy to move from Jenkins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We quickly hit the 20 pipelines limit per account that is imposed. Chaining pipelines is impossible if this limit is set, as that gets us to 20 even faster. Provider capability not that good, can mitigate it with jenkins but then what's the point of using it. Works very well for AWS, for other services, go figure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Loads to like with codepipeline. It is directly from amazon, so very well integrated with their s3 service. We can build, run tests, and deploy in one step, and that has gained them an upper hand. For the source provider, we can directly link up with github, however custom zip uploading is also supported if they are hosted in a s3 bucket. Very well integrated with jenkins, so the build and deployment step leverages it. Can deploy easily to most servers, if configured correctly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To configure it correctly, we needed to configure a host of things, The codepipeline jenkins pipeline is just the tip of the iceberg, we had to configure an IAM rule to allow it to execute AWS actions. After a few more config. steps, we could finally use codepipeline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- configurable configurations;

- 1-click deployment;

- organize dependencies in a multi project application;

- create a repeatable way to create artifacts that brings the application to production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- dependencies declariation the first time tend to be tricky. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I appreciated that we only paid for what we used. And no commitment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Custom plugins were a great addition but required a lot of trial and error Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AWS Code pipeline is a Software as a Service, no worries with setup and configuration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AWS Code Pipeline is nice but it makes you lock-in AWS Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.