AWS DevOps (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy)

Get certified in Developer Operations on AWS

Overview

References
What is DevOps (DevSecOps)?
CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy
CodeCommit setup
CodeBuild Setup
CodeDeploy Setup instances
- AWS CodeDeploy Setup
AWS CodePipeline
- View app deployed
- Make Change
Snapshot AMIs
Learning Resources
Boto Python
References
More on DevOps
More on Amazon

This tutorial contains my notes about getting certified as a AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional – able to setup and manage continuous integration and deployment in the AWS cloud – after paying $300 USD to write out 80 essay (not multiple-choice) questions in 170 minutes (3 hours with no breaks). That’s 2.1 seconds per essay question. Those who fail the exam must wait 30 days before being allowed to retake the exam (at additional cost), and only 3 times in a 12 month period.

NOTE: Content here are my personal opinions, and not intended to represent any employer (past or present). “PROTIP:” here highlight information I haven’t seen elsewhere on the internet because it is hard-won, little-know but significant facts based on my personal research and experience.

The previous pre-requisite is passing either one:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-sysops-admin-associate/
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-associate/

References

AWS DevOps Essentials

Building a CI/CD Pipeline

AWS Artifact competes with DockerHub, JFrog Artifactory, etc. to hold Docker containers and other artifacts built for loadeding into Kubernetes and other run-time systems.

From AWS YouTube playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukeH9VMPbNHMCXl_NrVc1JGe
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzuke5pqzTvI2ZxwP8-NwLACuU
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukeMbjRqGswHX38DCqOHZ5GA
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfVW6NrpDzdT6Sej0p5POkN
http://cantrill.io
http://ozaws.com
https://serverlesscode.com/
https://paulwakeford.info/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/
https://www.awsarchitectureblog.com
http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/application-management
http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/security/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/
https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/

https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/parameters-section-structure.html
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional 6-hour video by Nick Triantafillou covers:
- Core Concepts
- CI/CD Automation
- Monitoring/Metrics/Logging
- Security/Governance/Validation
- High Availability and Elasticity
- Operations

https://wilsonmar.github.io/build-load-balanced-servers-in-AWS-EC2/

Projects on AWS: Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline on AWS

From https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/latest/userguide/tutorials.html

A pipeline helps you automate steps in your software delivery process, such as initiating automatic builds and then deploying to Amazon EC2 instances. You will use AWS CodePipeline, a service that builds, tests, and deploys your code every time there is a code change, based on the release process models you define. Use CodePipeline to orchestrate each step in your release process. As part of your setup, you will plug other AWS services into CodePipeline to complete your software delivery pipeline. This guide will show you how to create a very simple pipeline that pulls code from a source repository and automatically deploys it to an Amazon EC2 instance.

What is DevOps (DevSecOps)?

Amazon defines “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.”

CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy

aws devops 201606-650x209-i11

CodeCommit setup

AWS CodeCommit User Guide
Create and Clone an AWS CodeCommit Repository video hands-on course.

AWS CodeCommit competes with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and other cloud-based text code repositories.

Repositories in AWS CodeCommit have a URL that contains a region, such as:

https://git-codecommit.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/MyRepo

CodeBuild Setup

AWS CodeBuild User Guide

CodeDeploy Setup instances

AWS CodeDeploy User Guide

In IAM Service, create Role “codedeploy”.
Create CDInstanceRole
In Compute EC2 service, launch Amazon Linux, t2.micro, 2 instances, using the role created above. In Advanced Details, paste script from https://gist.github.com/mikepfeiffer/4d9386afdcceaf29493a

EC2 UserData script to install CodeDeploy agent:
```
#!/bin/bash
yum install -y aws-cli
cd /home/ec2-user/
aws s3 cp 's3://aws-codedeploy-us-east-1/latest/codedeploy-agent.noarch.rpm' . --region us-east-1
yum -y install codedeploy-agent.noarch.rpm
```
CUSTOMIZE folder, region mentionedtwice.
Tag instances with name “Dev” for Development.
Add a Security Group Role for HTTP. No SSH.

AWS CodeDeploy Setup

Got to AWS CodeDeploy service, Get Started Now.
Custom deployment.
Specify an Application Name and Deployment Group Name according to your organization’s naming standards.
Select Tag Type “Amazon EC2” value “Dev” specified for 2 instances in a step above.
Deployment Config - AllAtOnce (instead of Half at a time).
No Triggers.
Select a Service Role ARN defined in a prior step. Create Application.

The AWS Console provides code to deploy from a S3 bucket.

AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline User Guide

Go to AWS CodePipeline service, Get Started.
Specify a Pipeline name according to your organization’s naming standards. (“Pipeline1”)
Select Source Provider: GitHub (NOT Amazon S3). Click Connect to GitHub.
Select a Repository and Branch from the GitHub account authenticated.
Select Deployment provider AWS CodeDeploy (NOT AWS Elastic Beanstalk).
Supply AWS CodeDeploy Application Name and Deployment group from earlier.
Do not define Build Stage (until we have a build).
Create Service Role using default name “AWS-CodePipeline-Service”. View Policy Document to review Actions allowed the role:
Review Pipeline summary.
Cleanup: Delete the pipeline you just created.

PROTIP: Each pipeline costs about $1 per month, and charges only if a deployment occurs.

View app deployed

In EC2, copy the Public DNS address, such as:

"ec2-11-222-177-132-us-west-2-compute.amazonaws.com

Paste URL in an internet browser.

It should respond with “Congratualations”.

Make Change

Commit.
Detect a change.
View app deployed again.
Create a Deployment Group or Autoscaling Group
CodePipeline

appspec.yml file in the root folder in source code repo

version: 0.0
os: linux
files:
         - source: /index.html
 destination: /var/www/html/
hooks:
  BeforeInstall:
 - location: scripts/install_dependencies
   timeout: 300
   runas: root
 - location: scripts/start_server
   timeout: 300
   runas: root
  ApplicationStop:
 - location: scripts/stop_server
   timeout: 300
   runas: root

For sample application, it’s just a single index.html file containing CSS, no JavaScript.

https://github.com/mikepfeiffer/aws-codedeploy-linux/blob/master/index.html
Install dependencies
```
#!/bin/bash
yum install -y httpd
```
Start server
```
#!/bin/bash
service httpd start
```

Stop server:

#!/bin/bash
isExistApp = `pgrep httpd`
if [[ -n  $isExistApp ]]; then
    service httpd stop        
fi

using AWS Code Services

CodeDeploy agent in EC2 Deploy Group

Amazon Route 53 globomantics.com
https://github.com/mikepfeiffer/PowerShell

Snapshot AMIs

Building a server from installers in S3 can be time-consuming because it take so much I/O and network bandwidth.

Michael Tripoli & Karate Vick at Netflix open-sourced on GitHub their Python tool called “Animator” for creating EBS-backed AMIs. The tool create a Base AMI by taking a snapshot of the root volume and making it available as an EBS volume that can be used to launch an EC2 instance.

It’s described on Medium and in this blog from 2013.

They said “We knew that application startup latency would be very important, especially during scale-up operations.”

This is simpler than Packer from HashiCorp.

Learning Resources

Australian Nick Triantafillou (@xelfer) for $99 provides 6 hours of videos covering 60 lessons in his ACloud.guru course.

Mike Pfeiffer created at Pluralsight a series of video courses, one for each “domain” of the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional exam:

Continuous Delivery and Process Automation 4h 16m Apr 28, 2016
Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging 2h 46m June 2, 2016
- CloudWatch
- CloudTrail
Security, Governance, and Validation 2h 11m July 26, 2016
- Delegation & Federation
- Corporate Identity Federation
- Web Identity Federation
High Availability and Elasticity 2h 51m Sept 26, 2016
- Auto Scaling
- GSI/LSI
- RDS
- Dynamo
- Aurora
- SQS
- Kinesis

Justin Manga (@jmenga, pseudo.co.de) in Pluralsight video course Continuous Delivery using Docker and Ansible shows learners how to create a Python app, then Jenkins 2 Pipeline plugin in a container using Cloud Formation files. deploy to a EC2 Container Services holding Debian instances.

Since ECS has Group of 497:

ARG DOCKER_GID=497
RUN groupadd -g ${DOCKER_GID:-497} docker
ARG DOCKER_ENGINE=1.10.2
ARG DOCKER_COMPOSE=1.6.2

http://blog.serverbooter.com/blog/2013/10/24/simple-clouformation-with-multiple-aws-accounts/

Boto Python

The README page says “Boto3 is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Python, which allows Python developers to write software that makes use of services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.”

https://github.com/boto/boto3

NOTE: Boto 3 is built on top of Botocore used by the AWS CLI:

Sessions
Clients: low level service connections

Boto 3 consists of these major features:

Resources: a high level, object oriented interface
Collections: a tool to iterate and manipulate groups of resources
Paginators: automatic paging of responses
Waiters: a way to block until a certain state has been reached

References

Amazon’s own DevOps Engineering on AWS 3-day classroom course covers:

Use the principal concepts and practices behind the DevOps methodology
Design and implement an infrastructure on AWS that supports one or more DevOps development projects
Use AWS CloudFormation and AWS OpsWorks to deploy the infrastructure necessary to create development, test, and production environments for a software development project
Use AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild to understand the array of options for enabling a continuous integration (CI) environment on AWS
Use AWS CodePipeline to design and implement a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline on AWS
Use AWS CodeStar to manage all software development activities in one place
Implement several common continuous deployment (CD) use cases using AWS technologies, including blue/green deployment and A/B testing
Distinguish between the array of application deployment technologies available on AWS, including AWS CodeDeploy, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and decide which technology best fits a given scenario
Use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager for patch management
Leverage automated testing in different stages of a CI/CD pipeline
Fine-tune the applications you deliver on AWS for high performance, and use AWS tools and technologies to monitor your application and environment for potential issues

More on DevOps

This is one of a series on DevOps:

More on Amazon

This is one of a series on Amazon:

Wilson Mar

AWS DevOps (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy)

References

What is DevOps (DevSecOps)?

CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy

CodeCommit setup

CodeBuild Setup

CodeDeploy Setup instances

AWS CodeDeploy Setup

AWS CodePipeline

View app deployed

Make Change

Snapshot AMIs

Learning Resources

Boto Python

References

More on DevOps

More on Amazon

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