Tag: GitHub

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How to use GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy for automated CI/CD builds and deployment

Introduction

I recently migrated a client to a new AWS-based infrastructure, fully automated and managed via IaC (primarily Packer, Ansible and Terraform). However, a somewhat clunky old build/deploy system was still being used, so it was also time to migrate that to a new automated CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) system for builds and deployments. Keeping costs as low as possible was a priority, so I ruled out Jenkins since that would have cost money to maintain an additional instance for extended periods of time.

Since GitHub was already in use, GitHub Actions was an obvious choice because the virtual instances (known as “runners”) used for code builds only exist for as long as necessary to run all the build commands. Costs are therefore kept as low as possible. Since the infrastructure was already running on Amazon Web Services, AWS CodeDeploy made sense as an integrated solution for deploying code. The challenge therefore was to get the builds working on GitHub Actions, then to connect GitHub Actions to AWS CodeDeploy for full CI/CD deployments.

This simple diagram shows the desired CI/CD architecture with GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy:

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How to set up a Kubernetes cluster with minikube and then with Amazon EKS

Purpose of this tutorial project

Our goal is to create a Kubernetes cluster serving the output of simple-webapp via nginx. simple-webapp is a simple Python app I wrote for these kinds of projects, which outputs a basic web page as proof of concept. In a real production environment, this would be a full-blown web application of some kind.

The Kubernetes cluster will consist of the following:

  • Two cluster Nodes.
  • A simple-webapp Deployment consisting of four Pods, each running the simple-webapp container, exposed internally to nginx via a ClusterIP Service.
  • An nginx Deployment consisting of four Pods, each running an nginx container with a modified nginx.conf file made available via a ConfigMap which allows nginx to reverse-proxy traffic to the simple-webapp service, exposed externally via a LoadBalancer Service.
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Creating a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub and Multibranch Pipelines in Jenkins

My intention here is to show how to set up a simple CI/CD multibranch pipeline for teams looking to explore the continuous integration and continuous delivery end of DevOps. This pipeline provides a starting point which can be changed and expanded depending on particular team requirements.

This article assumes your team is already familiar with git and GitHub, and that you have Jenkins installed and ready to use in a location accessible from GitHub. Installing Jenkins is quite straightforward so I won’t go into that here, as there are plenty of other guides available for that. I also won’t spend time explaining what CI/CD is, because again there’s plenty of info about that out there, and if you’re looking for implementation guides then you probably already know what CI/CD is anyway and just want to get started.

This pipeline uses three branches in the git repository: dev, test and main. The dev branch is for development builds. Upon creation of a pull request and successful merge from dev into the test branch, the test branch will be used to run a simple automated test. Again, after a successful pull request/merge from test to main, the main branch is used for delivery to a staging environment for QA testing. This is quite basic and can be changed and expanded according to team needs, e.g. feature branches for specific areas of code, additional test environments, the addition of deployment to a production environment, etc.

The pull requests and merges are done manually so that code can be reviewed and checked for issues before merging. Apart from that, the rest of the builds, tests, and deliveries/deployments are automated.

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How to use Ansible for automated AWS provisioning

I’ve recently produced a series of articles aimed at startups, entrepreneurial solo developers, etc. wanting to take their first steps into Amazon Web Services (AWS) setups for app deployment:

I then wanted to move on from discussing manual setup via the GUI interface of the AWS web console, to DevOps-style command-line programmatic setup for automated provisioning of an AWS infrastructure for app deployment, i.e. infrastructure as code (IaC). I have therefore created a suite of Ansible playbooks to provision an entire AWS infrastructure with a Staging instance and an auto-scaled load-balanced Production environment, and to deploy a webapp thereon. The resulting set of Ansible AWS provisioning playbooks and associated files can be found in a repository on my GitHub, so go ahead and grab it from there if you want to try them out. Keep reading for information on how to set up and use the playbooks (and you can also refer to the README in the repo folder, which contains much of the same information).

With these playbooks, firstly the EC2 SSH key and Security Groups are created, then a Staging instance is provisioned, then the webapp is deployed on Staging from GitHub, then an image is taken from which to provision the Production environment. The Production environment is set up with auto-scaled EC2 instances running behind a load balancer. Finally, DNS entries are added for the Production and Staging environments.

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