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CodeDeploy

Links: 102 AWS DVA Index

  • We want to deploy our application automatically to many EC2 instances. These EC2 instances are not managed by Elastic Beanstalk.
  • There are several ways to handle deployments using open-source tools (Ansible, Terraform, Chef, Puppet, etc)
  • We can use the managed service AWS CodeDeploy.

Working

  • If we are deploying to EC2 instances/On premises server then the CodeDeploy agent must be running on the instances.
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220517094620.jpg
  • The agent is continuously polling AWS CodeDeploy for work to do
  • Application + appspec.yml (root of the code) is pulled from GitHub or S3.
  • EC2 instances will run the deployment instructions in appspec.yml
  • CodeDeploy Agent will report of success/failure of the deployment
We DONT need a CodeDeploy agent for deploying to ECS and lambda.

It is only needed for EC2 and on premise instances.

Components

  • Application: a unique name functions as a container (revision, deployment configuration, ...)
  • Compute Platform: EC2/On-Premises, AWS Lambda, or Amazon ECS
  • Deployment Configuration: a set of deployment rules for success/failure
    • EC2/On-premises: specify the minimum number of healthy instances for the deployment
    • AWS Lambda or Amazon ECS: specify how traffic is routed to your updated versions
  • Application Revision: application code + appspec.yml file
  • Target Revision: the most recent revision that you want to deploy to a Deployment Group

Deployment Groups:

  • A set of tagged EC2 instances to which the code will be deployed.
  • You can specify one or more deployment groups for a CodeDeploy application
    • Like have 3 different groups test, staging and production.
  • Directly to an ASG
  • Mix of ASG / Tags so you can build deployment segments
  • Customisation in scripts with DEPLOYMENT_GROUP_NAME environment variables

Deployment Type

  • Deployment Type is a method used to deploy the application to a Deployment Group.
  • It is of 2 types

In-place Deployment

  • Supports EC2/On-Premises
    • Not available for AWS Lambda and ECS.
  • Updates the instances in the deployment group with the latest application revisions. During a deployment, each instance will be briefly taken offline for its update.
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220517100439.jpg
In place deployment is a deployment type whereas half at a time is one of the deployment strategies.
If we only have EC2 instances and no ASG then we CANNOT use Blue/Green deployment.

Blue/Green Deployment

  • Supports EC2 instances (with ASG), AWS Lambda, and Amazon ECS
    • CANNOT use blue/green for on premise instances (no load balancer and SG).
  • Replaces the instances in the deployment group with new instances and deploys the latest application revision to them. After instances in the replacement environment are registered with load balancer, instances from the original environment are deregistered and can be terminated.
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220517100450.jpg
  • Must have an ASG and Load Balancer.
A Developer is setting up a code update to Amazon ECS using AWS CodeDeploy. The Developer needs to complete the code update quickly. Which of the following deployment types should the Developer use?

Blue/Green since we cannot use in-place for ECS.

Permissions

  • IAM Instance Profile: give EC2 instances the permissions to access both S3/GitHub
  • Service Role: an IAM Role for CodeDeploy to perform operations on EC2 instances, ASGs, ELBs, etc.

appspec.yml

  • files: how to source and copy from S3/GitHub to filesystem. We have source and destination.
  • hooks: set of instructions which correspond to lifecycle events such as (hooks can have timeouts) :

  • Hooks for EC2:

    • ApplicationStop
    • DownloadBundle
    • Beforelnstall
    • Install
    • Afterlnstall
    • ApplicationStart
    • ValidateService: Run at the end to make sure our service is properly deployed to our EC2 instance.

  • Hooks for ECS: To remember (BA - IA (AI reverse))

    • BeforeInstall
    • AfterInstall
    • AfterAllowTestTraffic
    • BeforeAllowTraffic
    • AfterAllowTraffic

  • There is no ValidateService hook in ECS.

  • Hooks for Lambda:

    • BeforeAllowTraffic – Use to run tasks before traffic is shifted to the deployed Lambda function version.
    • AfterAllowTraffic – Use to run tasks after all traffic is shifted to the deployed Lambda function version.

Deployment Configuration

Deployment Strategies for EC2

  • One At A Time: one EC2 instance at a time, if one instance fails then deployment stops
  • Half At A Time: 50%
  • All At Once: quick but no healthy host, downtime. Good for dev.
  • Custom: min healthy host = 75%

Deployment Strategy for Lambda

Failures

  • EC2 instances stay in "Failed" state
  • New deployments will first be deployed to failed instances
  • To rollback, redeploy old deployment or enable automated rollback for failures.

Rollbacks

  • Rollback: redeploy a previously deployed revision of your application
  • Deployments can be rolled back:
    • Automatically rollback when a deployment fails or rollback when a CloudWatch Alarm thresholds are met
    • Manually
If a roll back happens, CodeDeploy redeploys the last known good revision as a new deployment (not a restored version)

Last updated: 2023-02-22