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AWS CodeDeploy features

Why CodeDeploy?

AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates application deployments to a variety of compute services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and on-premises instances. CodeDeploy fully automates your application deployments, removing the need for manual operations. CodeDeploy protects your application from downtime during deployments through rolling updates and deployment health tracking. CodeDeploy gives you centralized control of your deployments through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), SDKs, or APIs, allowing you to launch, control, and monitor your deployments. You can view the deployment progress down to individual setup events. CodeDeploy tracks and stores the recent history of your deployments, so you can investigate the timeline and change history of past deployments.

CodeDeploy is platform and language agnostic and works with any application, so you can reuse your existing setup code. You can also easily integrate your application deployments with your existing software delivery process or into a continuous delivery toolchain by using the CodeDeploy APIs.

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Automated deployments

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You can easily repeat an application deployment across different groups of instances with CodeDeploy. CodeDeploy uses a file- and command-based install model, which enables it to deploy any application and reuse existing setup code. The same setup code can be used to consistently deploy and test updates across your deployment, test, and production release stages for Amazon EC2 instances. Removing manual steps from deployments increases both the speed and reliability of your software delivery process.
CodeDeploy allows you to integrate software deployment and scaling activities in order to keep your application up-to-date in a dynamic production environment. For Amazon EC2 instances, CodeDeploy integrates with  Auto Scaling . Auto Scaling allows you to scale Amazon EC2 capacity according to conditions you define, such as spikes in traffic. CodeDeploy is notified whenever a new instance launches into an Auto Scaling group and will automatically perform an application deployment on the new instance before it is added to an  Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancer.
You can use CodeDeploy to automate software deployments across your development, test, and production environments running on any instance, including instances in your own data centers (your instances will need to be able to connect to AWS  public endpoints ). This allows you to use a single service to consistently deploy applications across hybrid architectures.

Minimize downtime

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Applications do not require downtime when they’re being upgraded to a new revision with CodeDeploy. AWS CodeDeploy can perform blue/green deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service (both Amazon EC2 and Fargate launch types), or a Lambda function. With a blue/green deployment, the new version of your application is launched alongside the old version. Once the new revision is tested and declared ready, CodeDeploy can shift the traffic from your prior version to your new version according to your specifications.

CodeDeploy can also perform a rolling update across a group of Amazon EC2 instances where only a fraction of the instances are taken offline at any one time. CodeDeploy progressively works its way across the instances, allowing applications to remain available and continue serving traffic. For Lambda functions, incoming traffic is gradually routed from the old version to the new one.

Deployment health tracking works in conjunction with rolling updates to keep applications highly available during deployments. Unexpected downtime can occur if bad updates are deployed. CodeDeploy monitors your deployment and will stop a deployment if there are too many failed updates.
You can stop an application deployment that is in process at any time using the console, the AWS CLI, or any of the AWS SDKs. You can simply redeploy that revision if you want to continue the stopped deployment at a later time. You can also immediately roll back by redeploying the previous revision.

Centralized control

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You can launch, control, and monitor deployments of your software directly from the console or by using the AWS CLI, SDKs, or APIs. In the case of a failure, you can pinpoint the script experiencing failure. You can also set push notifications that allow you to monitor the status of your deployments by SMS or email messages through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) .
One application can be deployed to multiple deployment groups. Deployment groups are used to match configurations to specific environments, such as a staging or production environments. You can test a revision in staging and then deploy that same code with the same deployment instructions to production once you are satisfied.
CodeDeploy tracks and stores the recent history of your deployments. You can view which application versions are currently deployed to each of your target deployment groups. You can inspect the change history and success rates of past deployments to specific deployment groups. You can also investigate a timeline of past deployments for a detailed view of your deployment successes and errors.

Easy to adopt

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CodeDeploy uses a file- and command-based install model, which enables it to deploy any application and reuse existing setup code. CodeDeploy uses a single  AppSpec  configuration file that you can use to run actions, tests, or verifications at each lifecycle event (phase of deployment). The commands can be any code, such as a shell script, a custom program, or even a configuration management tool.
It is easy to integrate application deployments with your existing software delivery toolchain by using the CodeDeploy APIs.  AWS CodePipeline and some  AWS partners  provide prebuilt CodeDeploy integrations for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services, simplifying automatic deployment of your updated application.

Receive notifications

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You can create notifications for events impacting your deployments. Notifications will come in the form of Amazon SNS notifications. Each notification includes a status message and a link to the resources whose event generated that notification.