AWS Codepipeline: Alert on Stage Failure

We've been using AWS Codepipeline for some time now and for the most part it's a great managed service. Easy to get started with and pretty simple to use.

That being said, it does lack some features out of the box that most CICD systems have ready for you. The one I'll be tackling today is alerting on a stage failure.

Building CodePipelines with Cloudformation: What's my configuration?

My company started using AWS Codepipeline as a somewhat reluctant PoC. It's not a full featured CICD service, but it is incredibly cost effective and easy to get started with. Amazon's recent release of invoking Lambda functions makes it much more flexible.

We've been using Codepipeline for several months now, and with it starting to look like a longer term solution for us some of the AWS Console limitations are becoming prohibitive. For example you can't move an action around in a stage in the console. Your only option it to delete and recreate the action where you wanted it to be.

Fortunately, most of these struggles are solved by creating your Pipelines in Cloudformation!

AWS CLI: Table Output

Earlier today I stumbled on an AWS CLI feature I hadn't noticed before, the "output" flag.

The default value of this flag is json, which is probably what you want most of the time. It makes it pretty easy to manipulate and pull out the data you need.

AWS Powershell Tools Snippets: CodeBuild Cloudwatch Logs

We've been using AWS CodeBuild to run java maven builds almost since it came out. It's great when it works, but when Maven has a problem it can pretty pretty difficult to sift through logs in the Cloudwatch console.