AWS Whitepaper Series: Practicing CI and CD on AWS

Title: Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS Accelerating Software Delivery with DevOps - June 2017

Emphasis on the Summary of Best Practices

• Treat your infrastructure as Code
• Use version control for your infrastructure code.
• Make use of bug tracking/ticketing systems.
• Have peers review changes before applying them.
• Establish infrastructure code patterns/designs.
• Test infrastructure changes like code changes.
• Put developers into integrated teams of no more than 12 self-sustaining members.
• Have all developers commit code to the main trunk frequently, with no long-running feature branches.
• Consistently adopt a build system such as Maven or Gradle across your organization and standardize builds.
• Have developers build unit tests toward 100% coverage of the code base.
• Ensure that unit tests are 70% of the overall testing in duration, number,and scope.
• Ensure that unit tests are up-to-date and not neglected. Unit test failures should be fixed, not bypassed.
• Treat your continuous delivery configuration as code.
• Establish role-based security controls(that is,who can do what and when)
• Monitor/track every resource possible.
• Alert on services, availability, and response times.
• Capture, learn, and improve.
• Share access with everyone on the team.
• Plan metrics and monitoring into the lifecycle.
• Keep and track standard metrics
• Number of builds.
• Number of deployments.
• Average time for changes to reach production.
• Average time from first pipeline stage to each stage.
• Number of changes reaching production.
• Average build time.
• Use multiple distinct pipelines for each branch and team.

Don’ts

• Have long-running branches with large complicated merges.
• Have manual tests.
• Have manual approval processes, gates, code reviews, and security reviews.