The MLA-C01 exam retires on September 28, 2026
You can still take and pass the exam until then — plan your exam date accordingly.
4.3.1. CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and SageMaker Deployment Guardrails
💡 First Principle: AWS Developer Tools provide the CI/CD backbone: CodePipeline orchestrates the workflow and CodeBuild runs build, test and training steps. The final hop differs from ordinary application CI/CD — CodeDeploy does not support SageMaker endpoints as a deployment target. Traffic shifting and rollback are handled by SageMaker’s own deployment guardrails on UpdateEndpoint.
| Service | Role in ML CI/CD | Typical Actions |
|---|---|---|
| CodePipeline | Orchestrates the end-to-end pipeline | Trigger on code commit → build → test → deploy → monitor |
| CodeBuild | Runs build and test steps | Run unit tests, package model code, validate model metrics |
| SageMaker deployment guardrails | Manage the endpoint update itself | Blue/green and canary/linear traffic shifting, CloudWatch alarms as auto-rollback triggers |
A typical ML CI/CD pipeline:
- Code pushed to repository (CodeCommit or GitHub)
- CodePipeline triggers CodeBuild
- CodeBuild runs unit tests on preprocessing/inference code
- CodeBuild triggers SageMaker training job
- Pipeline validates metrics against thresholds
- Model registered in SageMaker Model Registry (PendingApproval)
- Manual or automated approval gate
- CodeBuild calls UpdateEndpoint with a DeploymentConfig (blue/green or canary)
- Monitoring validates production performance
- Auto-rollback if metrics degrade
⚠️ Exam Trap: CodeDeploy deploys to EC2, ECS and Lambda — not to SageMaker endpoints. If an answer choice routes a SageMaker deployment through a CodeDeploy deployment group, that is the distractor. Endpoint traffic shifting and rollback come from SageMaker itself: production-variant weights, or a DeploymentConfig with CanarySize/LinearStepSize plus AutoRollbackConfiguration alarms.
Reflection Question: A team's ML pipeline breaks when a data engineer changes a feature column name upstream. What CI/CD test should catch this before training starts?
