Overview

AWS CodePipeline

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AWS CodeBuild

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AWS CodeBuild vs AWS CodePipeline: What are the differences?

Introduction

AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline are two popular services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are used for building and deploying applications. While both services are used in the software development lifecycle, there are key differences between CodeBuild and CodePipeline.

Development Workflow: AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy artifacts. It provides a flexible environment to build, test, and deploy applications. On the other hand, AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that orchestrates the different stages of the application release process. It allows you to define a workflow with multiple stages, each performing specific actions like building, testing, and deploying.
Integration with External Tools: AWS CodeBuild integrates with various tools such as AWS CodeCommit, GitHub, and Bitbucket for source code management. It also supports integration with other AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon ECR, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In contrast, AWS CodePipeline integrates with CodeBuild as one of the possible actions/stages in the workflow. CodePipeline can also integrate with other tools such as AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and third-party services like Jenkins and GitHub.
Pipeline and Artifact Management: AWS CodeBuild focuses on building and testing artifacts, but it doesn't provide explicit pipeline management capabilities. It allows you to build the artifacts using custom scripts or predefined build environments. In contrast, AWS CodePipeline offers a graphical interface to create and manage the different stages in a release pipeline. It also provides features to manage and track artifacts throughout the pipeline, making it easier to manage the overall workflow.
Deployment Flexibility: AWS CodeBuild primarily focuses on building and testing artifacts, so it doesn't have built-in capabilities for deployment actions. It can be used as part of a pipeline for artifact generation, but a separate deployment mechanism is required. AWS CodePipeline, on the other hand, provides built-in deployment actions that can be used to deploy applications to various targets like Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, ECS, and Elastic Beanstalk. It offers more flexibility in deploying applications in a coordinated and automated manner.
Logging and Monitoring: AWS CodeBuild provides detailed build logs and metrics that can help in troubleshooting build issues. However, it doesn't provide built-in monitoring and alerting capabilities. In contrast, AWS CodePipeline offers built-in monitoring and logging functionalities. It provides metrics and visualizations to track the progress of pipeline executions, as well as integrations with AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting.
Pricing Model: AWS CodeBuild pricing is based on the build duration and the compute resources used. It charges on a per-minute basis for the build time and provides different pricing tiers for different instance types. On the other hand, AWS CodePipeline pricing is based on the number of active pipelines and the number of pipeline executions. It charges separately for pipeline definition and pipeline execution, with additional charges for additional stage transitions.

In summary, AWS CodeBuild is a build service that focuses on building and testing artifacts, while AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that provides pipeline management and deployment capabilities along with integration with external tools. CodeBuild is more suitable for building the artifacts, while CodePipeline is useful for orchestrating the different stages of the release process.

Advice on AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild

Arthur

DevOps Engineer at DCSIL

Feb 6, 2020

Needs advice

We will use AWS CloudFormation, as it is ideal for deploying and replicating infrastructure as code. Amazon CloudWatch Events will be used to send info based on the trigger that initiated the event to developers using Amazon SNS. Amazon SNS will also be used in the AWS CodePipeline after the application has been tested and deployed successfully to the development environment, notifying users to approve the application before it can be deployed to a production environment. AWS CodeBuild will be used for running tests on the application and AWS CodeDeploy will be used to deploy the application to Lambda and Alexa Skills Kit. AWS CodePipeline is a service that will organize the steps taken (building/testing and deployment) when code is pushed to the master branch in our source repository in Github.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS CodePipeline	AWS CodeBuild
CodePipeline builds, tests, and deploys your code every time there is a code change, based on the release process models you define.	AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers.
Workflow Modeling;AWS Integrations;Pre-Built Plugins;Custom Plugins;Declarative Templates;Access Control	Fully Managed Build Service;Continuous Scaling;Enables Continuous Integration;Integrates seamlessly with AWS services;FAQs: https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/faqs/
Statistics
Stacks 547	Stacks 378
Followers 933	Followers 485
Votes 30	Votes 43
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Simple to set up 8 Managed service 4 GitHub integration 3 Parallel Execution 2 Automatic deployment Cons 2 No project boards 1 No integration with "Power" 365 tools	Pros 7 Pay per minute 5 Parameter Store integration for passing secrets 4 Integrated with AWS 3 Bit bucket integration 3 Streaming logs to Amazon CloudWatch Cons 2 Poor branch support
Integrations
Runscope Amazon S3 GitHub Jenkins CloudBees BlazeMeter Ghost Inspector AWS Elastic Beanstalk Amazon EC2	AWS Elastic Beanstalk AWS CodeCommit Amazon S3 GitHub Bitbucket AWS CloudFormation Jenkins GitHub Enterprise

What are some alternatives to AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild?

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

Buddy

Git platform for web and software developers with Docker-based tools for Continuous Integration and Deployment.

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.