AWS CodeDeploy

Interesting. Between Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks, and now CodeDeploy it seems like AWS is taking over every production developer workflow from the hobbyist on up.

This could be a big deal in terms of raising the bar for deployment practices.

Right now "nobody ever got fired for" setting up deployment via rsync and some ad-hoc shell scripts. That works for a single host, although it's not great for reproducibility. But as soon as you go to multiple hosts you need some degree of orchestration, monitoring, and integration with your load balancer to avoid downtime.

CodeDeploy offers those benefits, so if it turns out to be even slightly good, it could become the "nobody ever got fired for" choice, for any non-trivial app running on AWS.

I've only briefly read over the documentation, but this service seems to not follow deployment best practices that aws and others such as netflix have been talking about for years. Specifically the pattern of pre-baking an ami with your current version of the app you are deploying and any other needed software completely installed on the ami and then having an autoscale group be able to boot that ami up in a few seconds and start working. This greatly helps with scaling up, doing rolling upgrades and also very easy rollbacks.

The CodeDeploy service seems to operate by you manually launching base ec2 instance with a code deploy agent and then this agent will checkout your git code on the live instance, run any provisioning steps and then if things break somehow rollback all that work, still on the live instance.

I'm sure this is still a big improvement to companies who are manually sshing into servers and running deployments by hand, but as someone who pre-bakes ami's and does rolling upgrades with autoscaling groups this service seems like a step backwards.

I find none of them good enough for my workflow. I think heroku nailed it with their deployment approach for my case.

Beanstalk worker tiers are a nightmare. You need to place all your workers in separate repos, for example for git aws.push style workflow to work.

BTW, we now integrate with this from CircleCI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8597439

There's some discussion in that post of how it compares to pre-baking, etc. Of course there are trade-offs either way. CodeDeploy does require that your are careful with your lifecycle scripts to make deployments as atomic as possible. At least they provide a good selection of default lifecycle events for you to take advantage of.