CI/CD strategy for infrastructure and application code.

Question

I am in the early stages of building my e-commerce application using AWS. I am confused about how to approach deployment of my infrastructure and application code and setup CI/CD codepipeline for them. Currently my thought process is to have a mono-repo for everything. My main point of confusion while approaching CI/CD for it goes like this - let's say, at some point in future, I make some changes in the application code for some feature or some bug fix. I push my changes in the repo which will trigger the codepipeline. Given that I already have my infrastructure up and running, all my code in the repo gets rebuilt and redeployed through the pipeline. Wouldn't that "re-deploy" all my infrastructure code and every other thing that need not change again? How to approach this kind of situation? Should I start thinking about having multiple repos for infra and app code that will deploy what has actually changed?

P.S. - I am not hands-on to AWS and I've been learning it for couple months now.

Accepted Answer

Hi, if you have Terraform, once you have made the small change, it will just apply the small change (not redeploy all infra). If you have a team of developers, it makes sense to use 2 repos (one for infra managed by you, another for app code for devs).

In your case, one monorepo is fine.

Answer

Got a [blog post](https://blog.compose-x.io/posts/cicd-pipeline-for-multiple-services-on-aws-ecs-with-ecs-composex/index.html), admittedly old, but also thanks AWS, works the same way now as it did then, on how I do multi-accounts deployments pipelines. The git repo contains all the CFN templates (should be familiar given you are using CDK) and there is a "more recent" version of that in [this repo](https://github.com/compose-x/codepipline-orchestra) which has a [blog post](https://labs.compose-x.io/cicd/init_aws_accounts.html) associated with that.

If you are not going to use AWS CodePipeline, then this is probably only good on paper. But with that said, I very much recommend to use the same IAM architecture with your CICD tool of choice to limit the surface of attack in case of a breach. Use OIDC auth wherever possible.

Hope this helps,

Answer

with CDK it will be the same

CI/CD strategy for infrastructure and application code.

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