Serverless AWS CDK Best Practices & Patterns with CDK Pipelines - Part 1

An example of creating immutable builds using the AWS CDK and progressing them through environments to production using CDK Pipelines.

The article for this repo can be found here: https://leejamesgilmore.medium.com/serverless-aws-cdk-pipeline-best-practices-patterns-part-1-ab80962f109d

Part 2 of the series can be found here:

https://blog.serverlessadvocate.com/serverless-aws-cdk-pipeline-best-practices-patterns-part-2-5446a417d232

With its own Part 2 dedicated GitHub Repo here:

https://github.com/leegilmorecode/Serverless-AWS-CDK-Best-Practices-Patterns-Part2

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Getting started

We are going to build the following basic application to showcase the use of CDK Pipelines:

Note: This is not production ready and is solely created for discussion points throughout the article.

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Deploying

We will deploy through the pipeline for feature-dev, staging and production, and also allow developers to use ephemeral environments based on their current pr number for quick dev environments (as discussed in the article).

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Deploying the pipeline

Firstly, we need to add the GitHub secret to AWS Secrets Manager in a secret called github-token as described here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/v2/docs/aws-cdk-lib.pipelines.GitHubSourceOptions.html

To deploy the pipeline please run: npm run deploy:pipeline after adding your own account IDs in the pipeline-types.ts file.

Note: to destroy please use the `npm run remove:pipeline' script

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Deploying an ephemeral environment

To deploy a developer ephemeral environment:

1. Update the .env file and change the PR_NUMBER variable value.
2. Run the following command passing in your PR_NUMBER (example for 'PR-123' below):

cdk deploy ServerlessPro/Develop-PR-123/StatefulStack ServerlessPro/Develop-PR-123/StatelessStack --profile=featuredev

Note: There is an example of this and the tear down in the package.json file for reference. This could easily be scripted.

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