AWS CodeBuild Reviews

Right now, we are testing a small verification using AWS in the UK. As a cloud engineer, I regularly depend on AWS to speed up our applications, and we do this mostly using AWS services like EKS. Additionally, we use AWS CodeBuild to automate tasks such as setting environment variables and pushing code to the ECR repository, after which we deploy applications on EKS.

One of the main features I value in CodeBuild compared to previous experiences, like using Jenkins, is its ability to handle tasks automatically with AWS, requiring only proper setup of the check file. Remaining tasks are managed by CodeBuild itself. Furthermore, CodeBuild enables logging features during different phases, storing the logs in CloudWatch. This automatic scaling based on AWS attributes simplifies things significantly. The support team is also a beneficial resource, providing assistance in a friendly manner whenever there are issues.

We have it on various client projects and we rarely use it individually. It forms part of an entire pipeline committed in CodeCommit along with all the customers' code. Then, it's picked up by CodeBuild in the pipeline to build the site, update the sites, and update the services with CloudFormation scripts. This could be for a simple serverless website or more advanced projects where we need to build an image in Java or .NET.

The most important feature is that it's self-contained in an AWS account, and it's all linked to the customer's AWS account. You manage the identities through the AWS account, and AWS looks after the security and availability of the service. That's the key.

I use the solution for continuous integration.

The integration of the product with our ecosystem is very good. X-Ray and CloudWatch metrics are already integrated. If anything happens, we can see everything immediately. If it were Jenkins, we would have needed an instance to run it and a server to show the results. From that, I would have had to do a configuration for getting the logs to CloudWatch. The solution provides good integrations. We use CloudWatch metrics for logging.

We have been using Amazon EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, ECS, and EKS for containerization. For databases, we have been using RDS, Relational Database Services. We also use CodeBuild and CodeCommit for maintaining our code repository. Additionally, we have worked on a small project for migrating a bulk amount of data into AWS with the help of a migration service.

CodeBuild supports various platforms and coding, which offers an advantage. I have also been using AWS CodeBuild for our CICD pipeline, where we have source build, test, and deployment. 

We integrated AWS CodeCommit for repository management, and we transitioned from using Maven for the build process to AWS CodeBuild. Additionally, for testing, we use Selenium, and deployment occurs on EC2 AWS servers.

Our main use case for AWS CodeBuild is building our microservice-based application in the IT industry.

The tool is used to build and test code. I find its biggest advantages are elasticity and reliability. We can easily assign as many computing resources as needed to build our code, which is much simpler than traditional methods that require server upgrades. It's a serverless tool, so it's very flexible and elastic.

Integration with other AWS services and third-party tools like GitLab or Jenkins is simple. I haven't faced any challenges using AWS CodeBuild. It's straightforward and communicates well with CodeCommit for code storage, or it can fetch code from GitHub.

We are creating pipelines with the help of the solution. We need to do some testing and deployments over our web server. We create a new bucket in which we create a CI/CD pipeline and put our deployments into it. CodeBuild deploys it through GitHub on the target server.

If we face any issues, we can find out where the issue is. We can check it on the script. We can easily do debugging or troubleshooting. We had development projects. We are using CodeBuild for five to ten applications. We deploy them first in the development environment. After the Sanity tests and the UAT, we deploy them on the production environment. The integration with other AWS services has streamlined our workflow. It is similar to any other product. We must define the roles. It is easy to give permission to other services.

A normal use case for CodeBuild is to use it with the code pipeline for proper CI/CD. Normally, it's used to make a CI/CD pipeline.

A valuable feature is the support for third-party repositories such as Bitbucket, GitLab, or GitHub. Another valuable feature is the logging feature, which saves all the build logs in CloudWatch. This makes it easy to track or trace the logs of all the builds and helps in the troubleshooting process.