Accelerate Build Times and Reduce Costs with AWS CodeBuild

For businesses seeking to accelerate their software delivery, AWS CodeBuild offers a powerful solution. AWS CodeBuild, a fully managed build service, is designed to streamline and automate the build processes for your applications, ensuring seamless integration with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. It compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages. Whether you're working with a small team or managing large-scale enterprise applications, AWS CodeBuild provides the tools and flexibility needed to build, test, and deploy code efficiently.

Why AWS CodeBuild?

AWS CodeBuild stands out for several reasons:

1. Fully Managed Service: With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. You just specify the location of your source code and choose your build settings, and CodeBuild will run your build scripts for compiling, testing, and packaging your code. The fully managed nature of CodeBuild simplifies the process of setting up continuous integration and delivery pipelines, enabling faster and more reliable software delivery.

In sum, CodeBuild eliminates the need for managing build servers. AWS takes care of all the heavy lifting of managing the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing build environments. By abstracting away the complexities of server management, CodeBuild helps teams maintain a consistent and efficient development workflow.

2. Scalability: Scalability is a crucial factor in modern software development, especially for teams that need to handle varying workloads. CodeBuild scales automatically to meet the needs of your build processes. It scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. Whether you have a few builds or hundreds in parallel, CodeBuild can handle the workload without any manual intervention.

This automatic scaling ensures that build times remain consistent and predictable, regardless of the volume of builds being processed. By leveraging AWS’s robust infrastructure, CodeBuild can handle the most demanding workloads, ensuring that your development pipeline remains efficient and responsive.

3. Pay-as-You-Go: With CodeBuild, you only pay for the compute resources based on the duration it takes for your build to execute. This pricing model makes it cost-effective, especially for projects with variable build demands. There are no upfront costs or minimum fees.

Rather than investing in and maintaining expensive build servers that may be underutilized, you can leverage AWS’s infrastructure to handle build workloads as needed. This model helps optimize costs and ensures that you are not paying for idle resources. By aligning costs to actual usage, CodeBuild provides a flexible and economical solution for managing build processes.

Supporting Various Programming Languages and Frameworks

One of the key strengths of AWS CodeBuild is its versatility. It supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks out of the box, including but not limited to:

- Java
- Python
- Ruby
- Go
- Node.js
- NET
- Docker

Additionally, if your project uses a custom build environment, you can define your own Docker image to meet specific build requirements. This flexibility ensures that regardless of your tech stack, CodeBuild can integrate seamlessly into your development workflow.

Seamless Integration with CI/CD Pipelines

An integral part of DevOps is adopting the culture of continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), where a commit or change to code passes through various automated stage gates, all the way from building and testing to deploying applications, from development to production environments.

AWS CodeBuild integrates effortlessly with other AWS services and popular CI/CD tools, making it a cornerstone of your DevOps strategy. Here’s how it fits into the broader CI/CD ecosystem:

Integration with AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed CI/CD service that automates the end-to-end software release process. When combined with CodeBuild, you can automate the entire build, test, and deploy pipeline. Here’s a typical workflow:

1. Source Stage: A change or commit to the code in a repository (e.g., GitHub, AWS CodeCommit, Bitbucket) triggers CodePipeline with the help of a CloudWatch event. CodePipeline retrieves the source code from a repository.

2. Build Stage: The pipeline downloads the code from a repository, initiates the Build and Test action using CodeBuild, and securely saves the built artifact on the S3 bucket.

3. Deploy Stage: CodePipeline deploys the build artifacts to various environments, such as staging or production:

If the preceding step is successful, the pipeline triggers the Deploy in Dev action using CodeDeploy and deploys the app in dev account.

If successful, the pipeline triggers the Deploy in Prod action using CodeDeploy and deploys the app in the prod account.

This integration ensures that every code change triggers a series of automated steps, leading to faster and more reliable releases.

Integration with Other CI/CD Tools

AWS CodeBuild also integrates with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and CircleCI. By using webhooks or APIs, you can trigger CodeBuild projects from these tools, allowing you to leverage the power of CodeBuild while maintaining your existing CI/CD workflows.

To give an example, You can use the Jenkins plugin for AWS CodeBuild to integrate CodeBuild with your Jenkins build jobs. Instead of sending your build jobs to Jenkins build nodes, you use the plugin to send your build jobs to CodeBuild. This eliminates the need for you to provision, configure, and manage Jenkins build nodes.

Customizable Build Specifications

CodeBuild uses a build specification file (buildspec.yml) to define the build process. This YAML file allows you to specify various build phases, environment variables, artifacts, and more. Here’s a simple example:

This file tells CodeBuild to use Node.js 12, install dependencies, run the build script, and then package the build artifacts. You can customize this file to match your specific build requirements.

Yaml

version: 0.2

phases:
install:
runtime-versions:
nodejs: 12
pre_build:
commands:
- npm install
build:
commands:
- npm run build
artifacts:
files:
- '**/*'

Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are top priorities in AWS services, and CodeBuild is no exception. CodeBuild incorporates several features to ensure that your build processes remain secure. It allows you to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to control access to build resources and define fine-grained permissions. Every AWS resource is owned by an AWS account, and permissions to create or access a resource are governed by permissions policies. An account administrator can attach permissions policies to IAM identities (that is, users, groups, and roles). When you grant permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, the resources they can access, and the actions that can be performed on those resources.

For example, assume that you manage AccountA and AccountB. In AccountA, you have an AWS S3 bucket named BucketA.

1. You attach a resource-based policy to BucketA that allows all principals in AccountB full access to objects in your bucket. They can create, read, or delete any objects in that bucket.

2. In AccountB, attach a policy to the IAM user named User2. That policy allows the user read-only access to the objects in BucketA. That means that User2 can view the objects, but not create, edit, or delete them.

Additionally, CodeBuild can be configured to use encrypted storage for build artifacts, ensuring that sensitive data is protected throughout the build process, and integrate with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for added security.

These security features help meet compliance requirements and protect your code and build artifacts from unauthorized access.

Conclusion

AWS CodeBuild is a powerful tool for automating and scaling your build processes. Its support for various programming languages and frameworks, coupled with seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines, makes it an ideal choice for modern software development teams. By leveraging CodeBuild, you can focus on delivering high-quality code faster and more efficiently, leaving the complexities of building infrastructure management to AWS.

Whether you're a startup looking to streamline your development processes or an enterprise seeking to enhance your DevOps capabilities, AWS CodeBuild offers the scalability, flexibility, and reliability needed to succeed.

About The Author

Pouya Nourizadeh
Enterprise AWS Architect
Founder, Bringdev

Keep Up with Our Most Recent Releases

Get exclusive access to our high-quality blog posts and newsletters that are only available to our subscribers.