AWS CodePipeline
CodePipeline is the delivery pipeline that connects source changes to build, test, and deployment stages in order. It acts as the orchestration layer that turns separate tools into a repeatable release flow.
▶Architecture Diagram
🔄 ProcessDashed line animations indicate the flow direction of data or requests
If people still pull source, build, test, push images, and deploy in sequence by hand, even small releases take too long. Miss one step and the success criteria drift, and as the team grows the release process depends more and more on human memory.
Early teams connected build scripts and deployment sequences by hand to manage releases. As the number of services grew, pipeline tools like CodePipeline that standardize the delivery process became important.
CodePipeline receives source changes and executes stage-by-stage actions, connecting to services like CodeBuild, ECR, CloudFormation, and ECS to automate deployment. Success and failure at each stage are tracked.
CodePipeline and CloudFormation both appear in delivery chains, but their roles differ. CodePipeline orchestrates the release flow from source to deployment, while CloudFormation declaratively creates specific infrastructure resources. If the core problem is automating build, approval, and deployment order, look at CodePipeline; if the core problem is creating resources like VPCs or ECS services as code, look at CloudFormation.
Well-suited for container deployments, automatic infrastructure changes, deployments with approval stages, and automated repetitive releases. Declaratively defining infrastructure resources themselves is not the pipeline's role.