CI/CD Pipeline

Previously, it was a manual process to deploy code changes to AWS. For example, if developers would like to update the lambda function, they had to manually zip the code in their local machine, upload it to S3, and update the lambda function in AWS console. Such process is not only inefficient, but also error-prone.

To address this issue, we have set up a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate the deployment and updates of our AWS resources using GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD tool that allows us to automate, customize, and execute software development workflows directly in our GitHub repository. It is integrated with GitHub, which makes it easy to set up and use. It also provides a wide range of actions that can be used to build, test, and deploy our code.

Whenever code changes are pushed to the feature branches (i.e. branches that are not main), GitHub Actions workflow would be triggered to run the automated checks for the lambda functions and the CloudFormation templates. If the tests pass, a green check mark would be displayed beside the commit on GitHub (example shown below), indicating that the code changes are good to be merged to the main branch.

green_check_mark

Whenever code changes are pushed to the main branch of the cloud-2023 repository, GitHub Actions will automatically run the workflows defined in .github/workflows. The details of the workflows are described in the following sections.

Lambda functions

Whenever code changes are made to any of the following lambda functions, the GitHub Actions workflow defined in .github/workflows/deploy_lambda.yml will be triggered to do the deployment.

  • yv-stage-user
  • yvr-stage-device
  • yvr-stage-calibration
  • yvr-stage-emailnotifier

The deployment process is as follows:

  1. Zip the code with all dependencies, and upload the zip file to the S3 bucket yvr-lambda-functions.
  2. Deploy the latest CloudFormation template to ensure the configuration of the lambda function is up-to-date.
  3. Update the lambda function through CLI to use the latest version of the code in S3

API Gateway

Whenever there are changes of the CloudFormation template that defines configurations of API Gateway yvr-stage-api-gw, the GitHub Actions workflow defined in .github/workflows/deploy_api_gw.yml will be triggered to do the deployment.

IoT rule

Whenever there are changes of the CloudFormation template that defines configurations of API Gateway yvr_stage_iot_rule, he GitHub Actions workflow defined in .github/workflows/deploy_iot_rule.yml will be triggered to do the deployment.

(View GitHub documentations for more details about GitHub Actions)

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