Amazon CodeDeploy Features

You can easily repeat an application deployment across different groups of instances with Amazon CodeDeploy. CodeDeploy uses a file and command-based install model, which enables it to deploy any application and reuse existing setup code. The same setup code you use to deploy a revision to your development instance for debugging is used to deploy to staging instances for tests and then used to deploy to production for release to customers. Eliminating manual steps from deployments increases both the speed and reliability of your software delivery process.

Amazon CodeDeploy integrates with Auto Scaling to help keep your application software up-to-date in dynamically changing infrastructure. Auto Scaling allows you to scale Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define such as spikes in traffic. CodeDeploy is notified whenever a new instance launches into an Auto Scaling group and will automatically perform an application deployment on the new instance before it is added to an Elastic Load Balancer.

You can use Amazon CodeDeploy to automate code deployments across your development, test, and production environments running on any instance including instances in your own data centers (your instances will need to be able to connect to Amazon Web Services public endpoints). This enables you to use a single service to consistently deploy applications across hybrid architectures.

Applications do not require downtime when they’re being upgraded to a new revision with Amazon CodeDeploy. CodeDeploy can perform a rolling update across a group of instances where only a fraction of the instances are taken offline at any one time. CodeDeploy progressively works its way across the instances allowing applications to remain available and continue serving traffic. CodeDeploy can also perform blue/green deployments, where a new set of instances is provisioned and installed with the newest revision. Once the new revision is installed on the new instances, CodeDeploy reroutes traffic from your production instances to the new instances.

Deployment Health Tracking works in conjunction with rolling updates to keep applications highly available during deployments. Unexpected downtime can occur if bad updates are deployed. Amazon CodeDeploy monitors the success of each instance update in a multi-instance deployment. You can specify the minimum number of instances that need to remain healthy, and CodeDeploy will stop a deployment if there are too many failed instance updates.

You can stop an application deployment that is in process at any time using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon CLI, or any of the Amazon SDKs. You can simply re-deploy that revision if you want to continue the stopped deployment at a later time. You can also immediately rollback by redeploying the previous revision.

You can launch, control, and monitor deployments of all your applications to target instances directly from the Amazon Web Services Management Console or by using the Amazon CLI, SDKs, or APIs. You can view the deployment progress down to individual setup events running on each instance. In the case of a failure, you can pinpoint the exact instance and script experiencing failure without having to login to an individual instance. You can also set push notifications that allow you to monitor the status of your deployments via SMS or email messages through Amazon Simple Notification Service.

Applications can be deployed to multiple deployment groups. A deployment group is a set of instances, such as a staging or production environment. You can test a revision in staging and then deploy that same revision to production once you are satisfied. Amazon CodeDeploy uses tags or Auto Scaling group names to define deployment groups. You simply tag an instance to add it to a deployment group, and Amazon CodeDeploy will automatically deploy the latest revision of your application to it the next time you deploy.

Amazon CodeDeploy tracks and stores the recent history of your deployments. You can view which application versions are currently deployed to each of your target deployment groups. You can inspect the change history and success rates of past deployments to specific deployment groups. You can also investigate the instance-level events and timeline of past deployments for a detailed view of your deployment successes and errors.

Amazon CodeDeploy uses a file and command-based install model, which enables it to deploy any application and reuse existing setup code. CodeDeploy uses a single AppSpec configuration file to map files in your application to their host destination and specify the commands to run at each lifecycle event (phase of deployment) such as “install dependencies” or “stop server.” The commands can be any code, such as a shell script, a custom program, or even a configuration management tool.

It is easy to integrate application deployments with your existing software delivery toolchain by using the Amazon CodeDeploy APIs. Some Amazon Web Services partners provide pre-built CodeDeploy integrations with their continuous integration and continuous delivery services, making it simple to automatically deploy your latest application builds to your instances.