This document discusses best practices for continuous integration and continuous deployment on AWS. It provides an example workflow involving source control, testing tools, infrastructure automation, and deployment. It also covers topics like baking AMIs for deployment, using CloudFormation for infrastructure as code, and custom resources. The document concludes with recommendations around skills expansion, certification, and AWS training resources.

1. © 2014 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
Continuous Integration and
Deployment Best Practices on AWS
Adrian White, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
John Painter, Solutions Architect, Sourced Group

2. Innovation, Quality, Governance

3. Stacks /
Environment(s)
An example CI / CD workflow
CI/CD tool
Issue
Tracker
SCM
Infrastructure
automation /
deployment
Test tools /
harnesses

4. CloudFormation Stack(s)
An example CI / CD workflow
PHPUnit
jQuery
…
Tasks for AWS

5. A CI / CD pipeline
Teardown
Release
Deploy
Test
Code

6. Get your source under control
Prod Phoenix (feature)UAT
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown

7. Automated Merging
UAT Feature 2Feature 1

8. What does CI give us?
• Test driven promotion (of development change)
• Increasing velocity of feedback cycle through
iterative change
• Contain change to reduce risk
• Bugs are detected quickly
• Automated testing reduces size of testing effort

9. Demo 1: CI pipeline

10. What does CD give us?
• Changes are pushed quickly to production
• Immediate feedback from users
• Supports A/B testing or “We test customer
reactions to features in production”
• Hardens, de-risks the deployment process
• Gives us a breadth of data points across our
applications

11. Deployment approaches
• Deploy in place
– Manage interruption
• Bake
– Discrete environment
• Multiple environments from branches
• Support A/B testing
• “Rolling DNS”
Deploy Deploy in-place
Bake

12. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

13. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

14. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

15. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

16. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

17. Deploy in-place
Un-baked
• Common baseline AMI
• Customise at instantiation
• Change in-place
Your app
AMI

18. Bake process
1. Start a builder instance
2. Bootstrap / cfn-init, cfn-signal
3. Bake your AMI
4. Tag it
5. Destroy/clean up the builder instance

19. cfn-init
"AWS::CloudFormation::Init" : {
“cfn” : {
"packages" :{
"yum" : { "httpd" : [] }
},
"files":{
“/home/ec2-user/myfile.html:{
"source" : { "Fn::Join" : [ "", ["https://s3-ap-
southeast-2.amazonaws.com/",{ "Ref" : "S3Bucket" },”/myfile.html”]] },
"mode":"000644",
"owner":"root",
"group":"root",
"authentication":"S3AccessCreds”
},

20. cfn-init
"services": {
"sysvinit" : {
"httpd" : {
"enabled" : "true",
"ensureRunning" : "true"
}
}
}
}

21. Demo 2: CD pipeline

22. Release
awssummit-1.com awssummit-2.com
awssummit.com

23. Release
Release
Test the new stack
Match the traffic between the two stacks
Update the “floating” DNS record
Send Notification(s)
ROLLBACK

24. Blue green deployment
awssummit-1.com awssummit-2.com
awssummit.com

25. Blue green deployment
awssummit-1.com awssummit-2.com
awssummit.com

26. Blue green deployment
awssummit-1.com awssummit-2.com
awssummit.com

27. Blue green deployment
awssummit-1.com awssummit-2.com
awssummit.com

28. Teardown
Teardown
Ensure that no traffic is moving though ELB
Teardown the CloudFormation Stack
Deregister the AMI

29. Advanced Techniques
• Managing CD sprawl / Segregation of duties
• Extending CloudFormation with custom
resources
• Extending your CD tools

30. Stack chaining

31. Stack chaining

32. Stack chaining

33. CloudFormation Merging
Git Git
CloudFormation
Operations Repo Application Repo
VPC
Subnets
Security Groups
CloudFormation Frameworks
Best Practice
Application Code
Application CloudFormation
Load Balancing Setup

34. CloudFormation Custom Resources
• Change DB schema during deployment
• Extend CloudFormation to support other
services - “So You Think You Are An
AWS Ninja” talk
https://github.com/aws/aws-cfn-resource-bridge
https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cfn-custom-resource-examples
Parameters
Custom resource
implementation
Git

35. Custom resources – DatabaseSchema
"MyDBSchema" : {
"Type" : "Custom::DatabaseSchema”, "Version" : "1.0",
"Properties" : {
"ServiceToken": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:12345EXAMPLE:DBSchema",
"databaseChangeLog" : [ {
"changeSet" : {
"id" : "1",
"author" : "adamthom",
"changes" : [ {
"createTable" : { … }
} ]
}
}
}
}

36. Custom resources – DatabaseSchema
"createTable" : {
"tableName" : "example",
"columns" : [ {
"column" : {
"name" : "id",
"type" : "int",
"autoIncrement" : true,
"constraints" : {
"primaryKey" : true,
"nullable" : false
}
}
} ]
}

37. Extending your CD tools
Tasks for AWS
DynamoDB

38. Demo 2: Release
2
1
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown
Production
Code
Test
Deploy
Release
Teardown

39. Situational Awareness
Burden of Responsibility
APIs
Tasks for AWS

40. Containerisation
• Build environments for artifacts, don’t update
environments with artifacts
• All environments are transient
• Standardisation, abstraction and portability

41. Docker, Amazon Linux and Elastic
Beanstalk
• A framework for managing containers
• LXC containers are more lightweight than VMs
• Amazon Linux (2014.03) bundles Docker 0.9
and LXC 0.9
• Docker containers on Beanstalk are Go!

42. Innovation, Quality, Governance
Discrete environments for each branch
Automated testing on every commit on every branch
Leverage CD tools to provide separation of duties
Audit Logs
Git approvals process
Use custom resources to extend CloudFormation
Leverage DNS
Interface with the API
Environments for artifacts

43. Expand your skills with AWS
Certification
aws.amazon.com/certification
Exams
Validate your proven
technical expertise with
the AWS platform
On-Demand
Resources
aws.amazon.com/training/
self-paced-labs
Videos & Labs
Get hands-on practice
working with AWS
technologies in a live
environment
aws.amazon.com/training
Instructor-Led
Courses
Training Classes
Expand your technical
expertise to design, deploy,
and operate scalable,
efficient applications on AWS

44. © 2014 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.