It is 2015 and still I see organizations doing software deployments in ways that are error prone. I have seen deployment instructions that span multiple pages. Those documents look like a TV manual. Do you know what we do with those manuals? We don’t read them. That’s right.
No one reads those long boring manuals.
I have also seen manual deployments. In manual deployments, a developer will take the artifacts and copy and paste those files to a production environment. Human errors are likely to occur with these manual deployments.
Don’t worry. I have good news for you.
I want to introduce a tool by Amazon Web Services that solves this issue. The tool is called AWS CodeDeploy. Code deploy allows you to practice continuous deployment. No more manual deployments and no more long documents with instructions on how to deploy your code.
The nice thing about CodeDeploy is that allows you to deploy your applications to AWS instances and also on-premises servers. If your code runs on windows servers or linux servers, aws codeDeploy can handle that for you.
I’m a .net developer so I have experience deploying .net applications to windows servers. In a nutshell, you have to follow these steps to start deploying your apps:
1. Setup IAM user, instance profile and service roles
2. Install the code deploy service agent on your aws instances3. Add an appspec.yml file to your application
4. Setup a new codedeploy application along with a deployment group
5. Finally, add a deployment for your application
I hope this brief introduction will help your software development team consider AWS CodeDeploy to automate your deployments. In future posts, I will go into more details about the setup. Enjoy!