Introduction to Amazon Code Pipeline with Java part 1: basics of CI/CD

Introduction

Amazon has a relatively new service out called Code Pipeline (CP). It is a Continuous Delivery tool that enables users to run builds, tests and deploys automatically. Its purpose is similar to other CI tools such as TeamCity or Jenkins but there are some fundamental differences in the architecture and customisation options.

The company I work for had the honour to team up with Amazon and be among the first to integrate a custom job processor in CP before it was made public in June 2015. I was very fortunate to take part in this project as the developer who was responsible for writing the job processor. Our tool is a selectable option among the job processor tools of type “Test”:

In this series we’ll take a closer look at Code Pipeline and also how a new job processor can be integrated with it using Java. It’s a large topic so the series will also consist of many posts. At this point I’m not sure yet how many there will be but 15-18 is my initial estimate since I’d like to be as detailed as possible. The AWS CP home page provides a lot of details both about the general architecture and setup. The developer pages provide the API for the CP related classes and functions.

You’ll need at least a test AWS account if you want to try the tool and have a go at building a custom job processor. However, even if you don’t have an account it can be interesting for you to learn about this new technology.

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