2.1. Implementing CI/CD Pipelines

Consider what happens when deployments are manual: a developer spends 45 minutes clicking through the console, misses a step, and production breaks at 5 PM on a Friday. Without CI/CD, every release is a high-stakes manual process where human error is inevitable.

At 22% of the exam, SDLC Automation is the single largest domain — and for good reason. CI/CD pipelines are the backbone of modern software delivery, transforming manual, error-prone release processes into automated, repeatable workflows. Without a mature pipeline, teams ship slower, break more things, and spend weekends doing manual deployments instead of building features.

This section covers the complete CI/CD lifecycle on AWS: managing source code and artifacts in secure repositories, building and testing with CodeBuild, deploying with CodeDeploy across EC2, containers, and Lambda, and orchestrating the entire flow with CodePipeline. You'll learn to integrate automated testing at every stage, manage secrets securely with Secrets Manager and Parameter Store, implement deployment strategies that minimize blast radius, and troubleshoot failures when they occur.

Think of a CI/CD pipeline like a factory assembly line — what happens when one station breaks? Each station (stage) performs one specific task — compile, test, package, deploy — and passes the artifact to the next. If any station detects a defect, the line stops immediately. Unlike manual deployments where errors compound silently, automated pipelines fail fast and visibly. Without this automation, you're asking humans to be the quality control at every step, which fails at scale.