How should I deploy from staging to production when using AWS CodePipeline?

J_Pablo_Fern225ndez_6068 0
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We have a CodePipeline that runs on every GitHub commit/merge to the main branch, building the application and releasing it to a staging environment where we can manually test the application. Every now and then, ad-hoc, weekly, etc, depending on the project, we'd release to production manually. To implement this I added a ManualApprovalStep to my CodePipeline between staging and production but that means that my pipeline is never green. It's always stuck in blue:

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This makes me think that I'm using the wrong tool here.

My mental model is coming from Heroku (ignore the review apps, I'm not tackling that challenge yet):

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In Heroku there's a Tests tab that's green if the tests pass and there's a pipeline that's green if it gets deployed to staging. Lack of promotion to production in Heroku is not a non-green state in Heroku but it would be in ManualApprovalStep.

Is there another tool that AWS gives me to model this way of working that I'm missing?

Update: another big difference. The ManualApprovalStep seems to pile each change and releasing each change, one by one, not releasing whatever was the last release to staging, so clearly it's not analogous to the release to production that Heroku has.

aws-codepipeline amazon-web-services
1 Answers

You are right that the ManualApprovalStep is not a natural "promotion" mechanism. They are for yes-no approvals and will result in execution failure if rejected or after 7 days. Disabled Stage Transitions also sit awkwardly with your use case.

pipeline.CodePipline executions are (a) triggered on a change to a source and (b) meant to run all stages from start-to-finish. Executions are hard to interrupt. A consequence of a requirement to deploy environments independently is that environments are best modelled as independent pipelines, not stages within a single pipeline.

Simple Option: 2 github branches, 2 Pipelines

Clone your pipeline setup. A staging pipeline is tied to a staging branch source. A prod pipeline is triggered on changes to the main branch. This setup is easy to reason about and has the advantage that deploys always match your source. But it does not replicate the Heroku "promotion" concept.

Complex Option: 1 github branch, 2 Pipeline?

You could probably get something closer to the "promotion" pattern by having a pipelines.CodePipeline deployment for staging (tied to github) and a separate codepipeline.Pipeline pipeline for prod. The latter can be triggered by EventBridge events. Asset handling would be complex in this scenario.

[Edit:] Amplify CI/CD for the Front-end, CodePipeline for Back-end

AWS Amplify CI/CD gives you automatic feature branch deploys, PR review approvals etc. for front-end apps. Manual deploys require a workaround, but are possible. See this related SO question. The CDK supports Amplify build configurations. The catch is that these CI/CD goodies work for front-end apps, but not for arbitrary infrastructure stacks. To get the best of both worlds, split the app in two. Use Amplify for the high-velocity front-end and stick with CodePipeline for the back-end deploys.

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