The state of CodeCatalyst in July 2024

I am personally using CodeCatalyst regularly for a lot of private projects, I also work a lot with other users of CodeCatalyst and I give feedback to the CodeCatalyst team regularly. In this post I look at the state of the tool in July 2024 and about how I make use of it on a regular basis.

A few more months in…

CodeCatalyst has been officially announced in december 2022 and reached GA in april 2023. Since then, it has been getting a lot of updates and changes, some of them you’ve potentially never had a look on.
In december 2023, major updates for enterprise customers were announced alongside other features like packages and Amazon Q integration functionalities.

CodeCatalyst Best New Updates in July 2024

Since last re:invent, CodeCatalyst has gradually increased the third party integrations with the option to have your source code stored in Gitlab, Github or Bitbucket. We have also seen the expansion of Custom Blueprints to CodeGeneration for repositories stored outside CodeCatalyst itself.

Just recently, we have also seen the possibility to have more than one space attached to a single IAM identity center, which allows further usage of CodeCatalyst for more enterprise customers.

CodeCatalyst also announced the possibility to expand packages usage to other providers than just npm – you are now also able to store maven based artifacts or OCI based images in packages.

Major updates to custom blueprints and additional blueprints allow and anble you to on the onside import source code into CodeCatalyst and on the other side to create a custom blueprint out of an existing project. This should make creating blueprints more accessible.

For a few months it has also been possible to include “approval gates” in CodeCatalyst workflows. This is a very limited functionality, but it still allows some important use cases.

Is CodeCatalyst ready for prime time?

It still depends.

While CodeCatalyst has drastically improved and matured over the last 12 months, there are still a few things that need to get better before I would 100% recommend you to use it.

Things that mainly concern me as of now: CI/CD capabilities and integration with AWS services.

The CI/CD capabilities are still limited and need to be improved to be more flexible and integrated. Approval rules need to be more sophisticated and allow some more specification.

If you already have CI/CD workflows or branch permissions set up in a tool of your choice, having “import” functionalities that translate existing Github Actions, Jenkins pipelines or Gitlab workflows into CodeCatalyst workflows is missing as well as the option to automatically set up branch permissions.

Other than that, CodeCatalyst is pretty much ready to be used for prime time and it has some functionalities that are outstanding and should be marketted more.

Next steps? What I think could come next…

The brave option

I still believe that that most underrated functionalitiy of CodeCatalyst is the Custom Blueprints functionality. If you’re living in a k8s world, Backstage has been leading, together with others, the field of “Internal Developer Portals” that empower developers perform actions quicker and more eficient in their day to day live. Especially Backstage starts with the possibility of scaffolding projects and generating code. However, Backstage does not allow you to keep track of changes to the relevant templates later.

Custom Blueprints – and also “existing Blueprints” do empower developers to do exactly the same thing.

Given CodeCatalyst has already been opening itself with other third party integrations like allowing a full Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket integration, I can see a potential of opening CodeCatalyst up even further.

With the given and already available marketplace in CodeCatalyst – that is not yet used very much – this could be opened up to allow other providers to add additional integrations, actions, blue prints.

Still the team would need to add additional functionalities like dashboards, widgets, … to make CodeCatalyst like an “Internal Developer Portal”.

What is unclear to me is whether AWS will be brave enough to perform another 1-2 years of investment into CodeCatalyst before it can become the central place for developers on AWS. I am also not sure AWS will finally go All-In on CodeCatalyst or if they will continue to invest into the existing Code* tools (CodeCommit/CodePipeline/CodeBuild/CodeArtifact).

The usual way for AWS developer tools

AWS will continue to invest half-focused and try to stay “on track” to help a huge customer base to achieve the simple things with CodeCatalyst. Integrations to other AWS services will be missed, the adoption rate will be small. With this kind of investment, AWS will have multiple solutions of Developer Tools (CodeCatalyst vs. CodeCommit/CodePipeline/CodeBuild/CodeArtifact) in the portfolio that both do not solve “all” problems and usecases but serve different customer bases.

What I think will happen

Give CodeCatalyst is build in different service teams we will see some teams heavily investing into making “their” part of the product successful (e.g. “Packages”, “CI/CD” or “Amazon Q in CodeCatalyst”). We will start seing these unique capabilities reach other parts of AWS services or potentially also other platforms. CodeCatalyst as a product will continue to exist but the different service teams will start to focus on where they can make more “money”. CodeCatalyst will not be able to deliver the promise it had when it was announced as the “central place for DevOps teams on AWS”. CodeCatalyst functionalities will be made available through the AWS console. With that, CodeCatalyst as “the product” that I was hoping for will cease to exist.

What do you think about my ideas and assumptions? Do you think I am wrong?

Drop me a comment or a note, I’d love to hear what your take on the future of CodeCatalyst is!

Pipeline strategies for a mono-repo – experiences with our Football Match Center projects in CodeCatalyst

Both Christian and I have been writing about our “Football Match Center” project – and as part of this project we obviously also needed a CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) pipeline. Our aim was to be able to integrate changes that we do regularly and see commits to the main branch being directly and automatically deployed to our environments.

I will first try to define some pre-requisites and then talk about learnings and experiences.

What is a mono-repo

A mono-repo is an abbreviation of a “mono repository” which I understand as being a single repository, where different microservices or components are stored and saved in the same git repository. This can be various different services, infrastructure or user interface components or backend services.

A mono-repo has special requirements when building the CI/CD pipeline.

Expectations for our CI/CD pipeline

For our CI/CD pipeline we wanted to be able push changes to production quickly and be able to iterate fast. We wanted to achieve 100% automation for everything required for our project. As we have been writing, we completely develop this project using Amazon CodeCatalyst and thus the pipeline also should be build using the Workflows in CodeCatalyst.

Going forward we want to ensure that the pipeline also includes all CI/CD best practices as well as security scans and automated integration or end to end tests.

How to structure your pipelines

In this article we will purely focus on the CI/CD pipeline for your “main” or “trunk” branch – the production branch that will be used to deploy your software or product to the production environment.

We will not consider pipelines that should be executed on feature branches or on pull request creation.

The “one-pipeline-to-rule-them-all” approach

In this approach all services are deployed within the same pipeline. This means that there is only a single pipeline for the “main” branch. All services that are independed rom each other can deployed in parallel, services that have a dependency need to be deployed one after another. Dependencies or information from one to another service can be pushed through the pipeline using environment variables.

This can lead to longer deployment/execution timelines but ensures that “one commit” to this “main” branch is always deployed completely after a commit. If tests are included in the pipeline, they will need to cover all aspects of the application.

The “context-specific” or “component-specific” approach

Different components or contextes get a different pipeline – which means that e.g. the backend-services are deployed in one pipeline and the frontend-services in a different pipeline.

In this approach, you automate the deployments for components and need to ensure that, if there are dependencies between the components, the pipeline verifies the dependencies. If one component requires information from another one you need to pass these dependencies using other options.

This can lead to faster iteration cycles for specific components but increases the complexity of the pipeline dependencies. You can also do not directly see if a specific commit has been deployed for all components or not.

The “one-pipeline-for-each-service” approach

This is the most decoupled option for building a CI/CD pipeline. Each service (lambda function, backend, microservice) gets its own pipeline. For each service, you can implement service specific steps as part of the pipeline.

One of the main requirement for this is that the services are fully decoupled, otherwise managing dependencies can get very difficult. However, this allows a very fast iteration and development cycle for each microservice as the pipeline execution for each service is usually very fast.

The pipeline needs to verify the dependencies for each service as it executes the deployment.

Football Match Center – our experiences with building our CI/CD pipeline in Amazon CodeCatalyst

For our project we decided to start with a “mono-repo” – in our case today, we have a CDK application (written in Typescript) that describes the required infrastructure and includes Lambda functions (where required) and a user interface which is written in Flutter.

From a deployment perspective, the CDK application needs to be deployed on AWS and the Flutter application then needs to be deployed on a S3 bucket to serve as a Single Page Application (SPA) behind Cloudfront. Obviously this deployment/upload has the pre-requisite of the S3 bucket to be already available.

How we started

We started, very classic, with the “one-pipeline-to-rule-them-all” approach. We had one single pipeline that was used to deploy all services that are part of the infrastructure.

This pipeline started with “cdk synth” using the “CDK deploy” action in CodeCatalyst and then had other steps that depended on the first one – to executing the “flutter build” and later the “UI deploy” (using the S3 deploy action).

In this first version, the CDK deploy step had variables/output with the name of the S3 bucket and the CloudFront distribution ID passing it it to the next step where the output of “flutter build” was then uploaded and the CloudFront distribution invalidation request was triggered.

In this approach a commit to the “main” branch always triggered the same pipeline and this pipeline deployed the complete application.

We also used only natively available CodeCatalyst actions for deployment – “cdk deploy” and “build”. For the Flutter action we used a Github Action for flutter.

Experiences and pipeline adjustments

With this approach we had the problem that the Flutter build step took ~8 minutes and blocked a new iteration of changes in the CDK application or the lambda function. Thus, this slowed down our development cycle.

In addition to that we found out that there was no possibility to influence the CDK version with the CDK deploy action – but we wanted to be able to use the version defined in our Projen project – to be able to deploy to development environments from our local with the same version as from the CI/CD pipeline.

Both of these findings and experiences brought us to implement some changes to the pipeline:

We separated the UI build from the CDK build
We moved away from using “cdk deploy” and replaced it with a “build” step – to be able to trigger “projen” as part of the pipeline

So now we have two pipelines:

CDK deployment
- Triggered on changes to the “cdk-app/*” folder
  - Executing CDK synth, build and deploy steps – but not using the “cdk deploy” action but a normal build step instead
  - We adjusted the CDK app to include Cloudformation exports that exports the S3 bucket name and the Cloudfront distribution ID
Ui deployment
- Triggered on changes to the “ui/*” folder
- Reads the values for the S3 bucket and the CloudFront distribution ID from the CloudFormation exports using the AWS cli
- Executing the Flutter build steps and the S3 deploy action

These changes reduced in faster iterations for the development cycle of the CDK app and allowed decoupling the backend from the UI part. We were also able to fix the CDK version to the version we have selected in Projen.

In our project we have chosen the “context-specific” approach for the pipeline.

My recommendations for building CI/CD pipelines for a mono-repo

Our CI/CD pipeline is not perfect yet and we’re yet to add some important things to our pipeline.

From the experiences we have made I am still not convinced that our “context-spefic” approach is the right path.

As of writing this post in early April 2023 I’m inclined to move towards a model where we combine the “context specific” and the “one-pipeline-to-rule-them-all” approach: context-specific for “lower”, non production environments and then a single pipeline that does the promotion to our production environment.

Today we do not yet have a production environment, so we did not answer that question yet 🙂

How do you solve this challenge around building CI/CD pipelines for mono-repos?

Sending notifications from CodeCatalyst Workflows in March 2023

As Amazon CodeCatalyst is still in Preview, it has only limited integration possibilities with other AWS services or external tools.
Sending notifications from a Workflow execution is something that I believe is critical for a CI/CD system – and as I focus on CI/CD at the moment I’ll focus on the notifications on Workflows in this article.

What kind of notifications do I need or expect?

As a user of a CI/CD and Workflow tool there are different levels of notifications that I would like to receive:

Start / End and Status of Workflow execution
State / Stage transitions (for longer running workflows)
Approvals (if required)

In addition to that, based on the context of the notification I would like to get context-specific information:

a) For the “Start” event I would like to know who or which trigger started the workflow, which branch and version it is running on, which project and workflow has been triggered. If possible getting the expected execution time / finish time would be good
b) For the “End” event I would like to know how long the execution took and if it was successful or not. I would also like to know if artifacts have been created or if deployments have been done. If the “End” is because of a failure, I would love to know the failure reason (e.g. tests failed, deployment failed, …)
c) For the state transitions I’d love to know the “time since started” and “expected completion time”. I would also like to, obviously, know the state that has been completed and the one that will now be started.
d) For approvals I’d love to be able to get the information about the approval ask and all required information (commit Id, branch) to do the approval

What does CodeCatalyst Support today?

Right now CodeCatalyst allows to set up notifications to Slack.
Please see details on how to set this up here.
This notifications are also minimal right now:

In Slack this looks like this:

How can I enhance the notification possibilities?

Luckily one of the “core actions” is the possibility to trigger a Lambda function and this is what we are going to use here to be able to trigger advanced notifications using Amazon SNS.
In our example we are going to use this to send an eMail to a specific address, but you can also use any other destinations supported by SNS like SMS or AWS ChatBot.

Setting up pre-requisites

Unfortunately we will need to set up an SNS topic and a Lambda function in a dedicated AWS account in order to use these advanced notifications.
This means that we are “breaking” the concept of CodeCatalyst not requiring access to the AWS Console, but this is the only way that I found so far to be able to send additional notifications.

Ideally we would be setting up the SNS topic and the lambda function using CDK, but that increases the complexity of the workflow and of the setup and because of that I’m not including that in this blog post.

Setting up the SNS topic

Please create a SNS topic following the AWS documentation through the console.
We assume the topic to be in “eu-central-1” and the name to be “codecatalyst-workflow-topic“.

After the topic has been set up, you will need to subscribe your eMail address to it.

Setting up the lambda function

You can follow this blog post to manually set up the lambda function through the AWS console, please ensure to give the Lambda functions permissions to use the SNS topic.
The required code using Python will look like this:

import boto3

sns = boto3.client('sns')

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    try:
        message = event['message']
        topic_arn = 'arn:aws:sns:eu-central-1:<accountID>:codecatalyst-workflow-topic'

        response = sns.publish(
            TopicArn=topic_arn,
            Message=message
        )
        print('Message sent to SNS topic:', response['MessageId'])
    except Exception as e:
        print('Error sending message: ', e)

Obviously the same can be achieved using Typscript, Go or any other supported function.
Please adjust the topic_arn to match the topic that you just created.
After creation this Lambda function will now have an ARN which should look similar to this:
arn:aws:lambda:eu-central-1:<accountId>:function:send-sns-notification-python

We will need this ARN when setting up the notification in our Workflow.

Integration into the workflow

Integrating this Lambda function into a workflow is easy:

  NotifyMe:
    Identifier: aws/lambda-invoke@v1
    Environment:
      Connections:
        - Role: CodeCatalystPreviewDevelopmentAdministrator-wzkn0l
          Name: "<connection>"
      Name: development
    Inputs:
      Sources:
        - WorkflowSource
    Compute:
      Type: Lambda
    Configuration:
      RequestPayload: '{"message":"branchName: ${WorkflowSource.BranchName}\nCommitID: ${WorkflowSource.CommitId}\nWorkflow-Name: NOT-AVAILABLE\nSTATUS: EXECUTED"}'
      ContinueOnError: false
      AWSRegion: eu-central-1
      LogType: Tail
      Function: arn:aws:lambda:eu-central-1:<accoutId>:function:send-sns-notification-python

As you can see, we are integrating an “aws/lambda-invoke@v1” action which then points to the lambda function that we just created.

In the “RequestPayload” we are passing a few information to the Lambda function which will then be passed to the SNS topic as part of the message.
This is how the message will look when received as eMail:

Missing information and next steps for enhanced notifications

As you can see we are able to send notifications from CodeCatalyst to multiple targets, including eMail with this option.

What we are missing is – and I am not sure if thats possible or not – is all of the “metadata” of the workflow execution like:

Workflow-Name
State-Name
Project Name and additional information

In the documentation I was not able to find out the available environment variables about these information…. If you do have any ideas on how to access this metadata, please let me know!

A first look at Amazon CodeCatalyst – Managing your Cloud-Build & Deployment infrastructure natively on AWS

In this post you are going to get to know the new service that AWS announced at re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas. With this new service AWS brings the Code* tools (CodeStar, CodeBuild, CodePipelines, etc.) into one user interface and opens up the usage to new audiences.

Amazon CodeCatalyst is a service that helps you to manage your project code in a central place and allows integrating it with existing CI/CD tools. It also simplifies the cross account functionalities of CI/CD best practices. With the market place functionality it opens up the tool for further expansion through third party contributors.

Functionality highlights

Organizations and projects

CodeCatalyst allows the set up of an organization and projects within that organization. This allows a structured set up of your projects and allows you to segregate access. What I have not been able to verify is if existing organizations of AWS Organizations are automatically imported and available in the service. This would be beneficial for larger organizations that want to get started with CI/CD on AWS.

Integration with your “builder ID”

Amazon CodeCatalyst is integrated with AWS your builder id – and that means that you can have a unique, personal account. This account is not tied or attached to an existing AWS account. The integration with the AWS accounts it done through cross account permissions that are created automatically for you. This concept has various benefits:

You (as a developer) can have access to the required CI/CD structure and code management without the requirement to have an IAM user or access to the AWS console to the specific AWS account that you are aiming to deploy to
You (as a developer) can have access to different “organizations” and “projects” within the service – which will make it easier for 3^rd party teams working on AWS projects (e.g. consultancy engagements)
You can allow the CodeCatalyst workflows to only be able to deploy into certain accounts and the list of accounts that you can connect to from a specific project or organization can be modified on demand

Unified user interface and workflows

The new user interface of CodeCatalyst allows to look at the complete lifecycle of your product – form development to deployment – within the same window. You can easily set up a project, connect or set up a repository and then create a CI/CD pipeline (or workflow) for it. You will also be able to visualize the workflow of your CI/CD pipeline during creation or editing.

Integration of Github Actions

With the integration of existing Github actions and the possibility to re-use already available automation steps within your workflow AWS opens the door to re-use and migrate a lot of already existing functionality. This is going to be very beneficial and will help to drive the adoption of the service. The availability of “native” actions as part of CodeCatalyst is still limited and I assume with the Marketplace new actions will be made available quickly and the list of available actions will grow rapidly.

Project Templates – CI/CD pipelines

I believe that this is the most important functionality of the service. Allowing to quickly set up new applications, workflows or projects on the service empowers developers to get started efficiently. I’m eager to see additional templates going forward. As you can include both infrastructure and application code, but also the required workflow in a template (=that’s your deployment pipeline), I hope that with this functionality we will be able to empower developers to re-use better CI/CD pipelines that enforce a DevSecOps mindset and include all of the “best practices”. I would love to see all of the reference implementations of the “DPRA” (Deployment Pipeline Reference Implementation) implemented as templates in this service.

A good, automated CI/CD pipeline helps your developers to focus on creating business value – the more you can “re-use” or drive through standards and templates, there more efficient your teams will be.

Additional wishes

As I have not explored all areas of CodeCatalyst yet, some of my “wishes” might already be implemented and I did not yet discover them – here’s a few things that I’d love to see but haven’t found yet. Please reach out to me if this is functionality that is available somewhere and I’ve missed to find it 😊

Re-applying project templates

I would love to be able to re-apply a project template to an existing project, especially for the workflows. This allows two things: 1) if you’ve changed the workflow and it doesn’t work anymore, you can quickly go back to the working version. 2) if the template changes, you can re-apply the changes to a project without the need to access every project manually.

In combination, some times a project changes or evolves and you might want to move it from a “backend” project-template to a “full-stack” project. This can today only be achieve manually but not in an automated fashion.

Better “mobile app” support

As you’ve maybe read, I’m working on a “Flutter” application – and because of that I would really love to see a possibility in CodeCatalyst that better supports the “cross platform” app functionality. Today, the service mainly focuses on provisioning AWS infrastructure. As you build a complex project that also needs to publish a mobile application, it would be very bene be able to use the service to also publish the application itself into the different stores automatically. Of course there are other, 3^rd party systems that already allow that, but if you want to use CI/CD natively on AWS this is currently not possible. I know I’ve mentioned that before, but as I have not seen the possibility to perform an iOS build on CodeCatalyst, I wanted to highlight it again.

Additional 3^rd party integrations / workflows

One of the assets of the service is definitely the market place functionality that will quickly allow to integrate new 3^rd party services. What I would like to see here is the support of additional repository stores besides Github (e.g. Bitbucket, Gitlab, and the corresponding “datacenter” versions), but also the possibility of a native integration of other tools that are required as part of the CI/CD pipeline – things like Codecov, SonarQube, Checkmarx, Snyk, Aquasec, etc. This might be possible through custom actions, but I am not yet clear on how fast these will be available.

Infrastructure as Code support for provisioning and setting up your CodeCatalyst environment

I’m not clear about the possibility to set up your CodeCatalyst environment through Cloudformation/CLI calls or through CDK/Terraform and I am unsure if that would be something that is required for this service. What would definitely be good to have is the possibility to set up integrations to your existing accounts and projects in an automated form – the CLI commands make that possible, but that’s not the same as directly defining it “as code”.

Native branch support for projects & workflows

CodeCatalyst allows to refer to different branches, but it would be cool to get a possibility to natively support “ephemeral” environments as part of your CI/CD process. There are two use cases that I have in mind:

Integration tests as part of the CI/CD process (workflow) that require the infrastructure to be available and provisioned
Environments to replicate/test defects or new functionality

For both of these use cases, the CI/CD tool should be able to deploy an environment from a branch – and then also automatically de-provision it based on rules. Today this is something that you would need to manually replicate within your workflows and infrastructure as code.

Overall summary and outlook

The service is overall is a great addition (or maybe a replacement?) of the existing Code* tools on AWS and it streamlines a lot of things that were previously not working perfectly on AWS. For a new service it’s a solid launch with a lot of benefits, especially for small companies or open source projects that do not have the possibility to use existing third party tools or really just want to focus on generating business value. I do not think that CodeCatalyst will be able to replace existing Jenkins installations or services for bigger enterprises right now, as there are a few things that are not yet possible.

What do you think of CodeCatalyst? Please share your thoughts and feedback with me (either on the comments, on LinkedIn or by mail.

Continuous Integration and Deployment on AWS – and my wishlist for CI/CD Tools on AWS

As I’ve been sharing before, I am very fortunate this year and will be giving a DevChat at the biggest AWS conference of the world – at re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas.

AWS offers different tools for all parts of your CI/CD lifecyle.
In this post I am going to cover the set of Code* tools that are available on AWS today – and will share my thoughts about what these tools are missing.

As part of the preparation for the talk and as part of both my private project (code-name: MPAGA) and my main job @ FICO I have been researching and learning a lot about CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) – and for the private projects especially around CI/CD that natively runs on AWS.
I’ve found out that not everything that these tools offer today is perfect and wanted to share some ideas on what could be improved. Where possible or applicable, I will also propose workarounds or alternatives.

We will look at a few of the tools in the order of the “product lifecycle”:
1. Code
2. Build/Test
3. Deploy
4. Release

Tools that are part of the “Code” phase

For the purpose of this post we are going to focus on tools that are natively offered by AWS as already mentioned and part of your CI/CD pipeline.

AWS CodeStar – Integration of projects

AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS and provides a unified interface for your project. It provides you different templates that you can choose from to quickly start your project.

It allows you to manage your team, with permissions and integrates with your existing JIRA for issue management. It also integrates with your IDE (or with Cloud9).
You can also integrate with an existing Github repository.

AWS CodeCommit – hosted Git

AWS CodeCommit is a managed service for Git (just like Bitbucket, Github, Gitlab, …. It provides a hosted “git” environment that is encrypted at rest and can be accessed using usual Git clients.

AWS CodeGuru

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool that provides intelligent recommendations to improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code. Integrate CodeGuru into your existing software development workflow to automate code reviews during application development and continuously monitor application’s performance in production and provide recommendations and visual clues on how to improve code quality, application performance, and reduce overall cost.

Tools that are part of the “Build” or “Test” phase

AWS CodePipeline – Tool to manage your CI/CD pipeline

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.

AWS CodeBuild – Build tool based on containers

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.

AWS CodeArtifact – artifact storage

AWS CodeArtifact allows you to store artifacts using popular package managers and build tools like Maven, Gradle, npm, Yarn, Twine, pip, and NuGet.

Tools that are part of the “deploy” phase

AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to various compute services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers.

AWS FIS

AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) is a fully managed service for running fault injection experiments to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.

Tools that are part of the “Release” phase

AWS AppConfig (part of Systems Manager)

AWS AppConfig makes it easy for customers to quickly and safely configure, validate, and deploy feature flags and application configuration.

Wishlist

I’ve been able to gain some experience with the tools while working on a few projects, including cdk-codepipeline-flutter and here is a list of things that I believe could be improved.
My main focus here is on CodePipeline, as it serves as the glue between all of the other tools.

Native branch support for CodePipelines

Working with Jenkins and the MultiBranch plugin makes it easy to allow developers to quickly test and deploy code that they are working on using the CI/CD pipeline. Unfortunately, CodePipeline today does not allow automated branch discovery, so if you want to enable the automated execution of a pipeline for a branch, you will need to manually configure webhooks and then create a new pipeline (or delete an existing pipeline) when branches are created (or deleted). This is not easy to implement and it would be great if CodePipeline should natively allow creating a pipeline automatically for all branches of a linked Git repository.

Additional Templates and Best Practices

When setting up a CI/CD pipeline on AWS CodePipeline, this would be easier to use if additional best practices and templates would be available as part of the tool itself. AWS is starting to promote a new Open Source project called “Deployment Pipeline Reference Architecture“. this is a step in the right direction, but it needs to be expanded by other flavours of a deployment pipeline. Also the code examples need to be improved, made up to date and needs to include all languages supported by AWS CDK.
This is critical to allow an efficient adoption of the different tools.

Native integration of 3rd party tools

AWS CodePipeline should natively support integrations to other 3rd party tools that should be part of your CI/CD pipeline – e.g. security scans like Aquasec and Checkmarx.

Remove dependency for a specific AWS account and support Cross-Account deployments natively

As indicated in this AWS Blog post, the best practice for setting up a CI/CD pipeline and for managing your deployments is to use multiple, different accounts to manage your deployments. CI/CD should not be bound to an account level and this includes the management of your accounts that are able to access and configure the CI/CD tools.
Maybe a good option here would be the integration with the AWS Identity service. That might allow decoupling the CI/CD toolchain from the AWS account.

Up to date CodeBuild images

Docker Images provided by the CodeBuild team should be updated regularly and should support all “modern” toolkits. The open source project has some activity, but an issue for supporting newer Android versions is now open for some time…

Publishing options to the different mobile stores (AppStore, Play Store, Windows Store, etc….) should be possible

I’ve been looking at developing a mobile app using Flutter, but what I have not yet been able to achieve is pushing the created and build applications to the different app stores. Today, AWS does not support this natively.
You CAN integrate this with 3rd party tools like CodeMagic, but natively there is no option on AWS to publish your application.

Wrap up

This concludes the wish list that I have today for the existing AWS CI/CD tools.

Did I miss anything that you believe should be added?

Use the comments to give feedback or reach out to me on LinkedIn or by E-Mail!

Building a Flutter application for Web, iOS and Android using a CI/CD pipeline on CodeBuild – #cdk4j

This post is a follow up to the last one where I showed a CDK project that can be used to build a Flutter application for Web.

Building a Flutter application (for Web) with AWS Lambda Function URL backend using AWS CDK Pipelines (written in Java)

In this post, we are going to expand our existing project on Github to be able to build an “apk” file for Android and a zip file for iOS. Before I can show you how this is possible, let’s start with some challenges that I’ve faced 🙂

The aim of this CI/CD pipeline is (not yet) to be able to push the apps into the AppStore / PlayStore for testing. That’s something we can add later 😉

Challenges on the way to a full CI/CD pipeline for Flutter on CodeBuild

While preparing this post I unfortunately faced more problems building up the pipeline than expected. Several problems.

AWS CodePipeline does not support M1 / macOS build images

Currently, AWS CodePipeline unfortunately does not provide the possibility to use the famous M1 minis on AWS as CodeBuild images. Tis his a real problem, as is makes it impossible to use CodeBuild for building iOS apps.
Running XCode on macOS is a requirement for building a Flutter app for iOS.
The M1 minis on AWS are currently pricey as hell for this use case – if you start ONE build you are directly charged 24 hours, even if the build takes only a few minutes! You need to actual get a dedicated instance, … – not usable for our use case of quickly building something for a side-project.
So we needed to find an alternative… read below! 😉

The current AWS CodePipeline standard runtimes are not able to build (modern) Android applications

The runtimes available and exposed by CodePipeline support Android runtime 29 – and the Docker images are provisioned using Java 8. Unfortunately, as of July 2021, the Android gradle tools (used by Flutter) require Java 11. I have created an issue in the corresponding Github (see here) but needed to find a workaround to move on – I think I’ve found one, but I hope that anyone reading this might have a better way or idea?

TypeScript dependencies on AWS Lambda can take your sleep

When implementing the trigger for the iOS App build (see more details below) I decided to “quickly” implement the HTTPS POST call using TypeScript – which turned out to be a bad decision 🙂
I had trouble getting the “axios” dependency that I am using installed correctly. I asked around, especially my fellow AWS Community Builders and got a lot of great tips and ideas (kudos to Martin and Matt). Martin had the right “stomach feeling – I was missing a “npm install”.

Matt enlightened me with the three different possibilities of making Typescript Lambda functions understand their dependencies:

1. Bundle dependency with your source code (can be achieved using esbuild)
2. Add a package.json and node_modules to the lambda function source – only a good idea if dependencies cannot be minified
3. Put the dependencies in a lambda layer
Matt Morgan

At the end, this challenge was especially difficult because I needed to add the required “npm install” in two places: In the “installCommands” for the CodePipeline itself and in the “installCommands” for the Flutter build step.

CodeBuild is slow, misses conditional steps and misses integrations – and does not easily allow multi-branch pipelines

While implementing the pipeline and solving the different challenges mentioned above, I lost some time because of CodeBuild being “slow” (>1min wait time during provisioining of the build containers). Thats understandable given the nature of the service, however it would be cool to have something like a “warm start” for a pipeline where the containers are re-used instead of re-provisioned.

There are no conditional steps – no chance to run a job only based on environment variables or anything similar. That made me implement a workaround. It would be cool to be able to use something like “branch-conditions” in the way Jenkins offers it.

CodeBuild offers only basic integration to SNS, but you cannot integrated a “lambda build step” to run the CodeMagic integration i nparallel to the flutter build job, but that is not possible, so I needed to run this “at the end” of the pipeline.

Another thing I’d love to have: multibranch pipelines. I needed to merge everything to main directly in order to test, because I couldnt figure out how my CDKPipeline would be able toe support multiple branches.

Reaching the goal: a full CI/CD pipeline running on AWS CodeBuild to build a Flutter app for Web, Android and iOS

Here is a diagram of the “final result” that I am presenting today:

Overview picture for CI/CD pipeline for Flutter App publishing to Web, Android APK and iOS zip

The “output” artifacts of our pipeline are:
– Flutter Web application (located on S3 and reachable through HTTP call)
– Flutter Android APK (that can be side-loaded on Android phones, located on S3 bucket)
– Flutter iOS App (that can be side-loaded on iOS phones, located within CodeMagic)

As the diagram shows, we needed to fall back to an 3rd-party, non-AWS service to be able to package the iOS application. After doing a quick “vendor selection” and a shortlist that included Bitrise and CodeMagic I decided to integrate CodeMagic in this example – because I liked the API more and it offers more free build credits/minutes. Setting it up took less then 5 minutes – it connects natively to Github and the set up of the Flutter pipeline is very easy.
The integration is set up using a Lambda function that calls the “start build” API.

How did I solve the challenges mentioned above?

The problem building the iOS image was resolved by integrating the external Service CodeMagic.

The Android Runtime Dependencies problems with Java 11 was resolved by switching to a custom docker container (Open source) – and then installing the requirements on top of it (npm/node, awscli, etc.).

What did you learn in this post?

In this post you have learned on how to expand the implementation of our CI/CD pipeline for an example Flutter application to not only building a “web” application, but also building an Android APK and an iOS zip file.
You have also seen an extension and integration of the Codepipeline with SNS for notifications and those events being picked up by a lambda function to trigger an external HTTPs API.
This is a major step – with this pipeline we are able to publish our application for three different “platforms” without a single code change – and it will all happen completely automatically!

I’d be glad to get your inputs into my Github repository as a pull request or just as comments on the project itself.

Next steps

Further expansions needed to this project:
– CodePipeline already has a SNS topic that it reports to – but right now the build iOS / Android App packages are not exposed anywhere – the idea would be to publish to an SQS queue the name of the APK file and the CodeMagic Build Id – and have a lambda function that is triggered by the queue update a link on the example application to download the newest version of the app 😉 Today, we need to retrieve both from S3 / CodeMagic itself
– use the CloudFormation Exports of the Lambda functions in the Flutter application instead of hardcoding the URLs for the Lambda Function URLs- enhance security for Lambda Function URLs
– add CloudFront in front of S3 to allow HTTPs connections to the Flutter App
– enhance CI/CD pipeline to package Windows App using Flutter
– enhance CI/CD pipeline to push created apps to App Store / Play Store

Feel free to contribute and add your contributions to this project into my Github repository.