4.4.1. Key Concepts Review: SDLC & CI/CD from Dev Perspective

First Principle: Automating the SDLC and CI/CD minimizes manual errors, accelerates application delivery, and ensures consistency across development and deployment environments.

For developers, understanding how their code moves through the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and how CI/CD pipelines automate this process is crucial.

Core Concepts & AWS Services for SDLC & CI/CD (Developer Focus):

• Version Control: AWS CodeCommit for code storage and collaboration.
• Continuous Integration (CI): AWS CodeBuild for automated builds and tests, ensuring code quality.
• Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD): AWS CodeDeploy for automating application deployments to various compute targets (EC2, Lambda, ECS).
• Pipeline Orchestration: AWS CodePipeline for connecting all stages.
• Artifact Management: Amazon S3, Amazon ECR for storing build outputs and container images.
• Secrets Management: AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for securely handling application secrets in the pipeline.
• Automated Testing: Integrating unit, integration, and functional tests into the pipeline.

Scenario: You need to develop a new application and ensure its code changes are frequently integrated, tested automatically, and deployed reliably.

Reflection Question: How does implementing SDLC automation and a CI/CD pipeline (using CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline) fundamentally minimize manual errors, accelerate application delivery, and ensure consistency across development environments?