Github Actions vs. AWS Codepipeline – Overview
As software development moves to the cloud, there’s an increasing number of tools that can be used to build, test and deploy applications. While they’re not all directly competing with each other, it can be hard to decide which tool is right for your team.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild compare when it comes to workflow management and isolated job execution.
We’ll also cover pricing so you can make an informed decision about which tool is right for your team.
AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions are both ways to build and deploy applications. They differ in the way they are used but are similar in many other ways. This article compares and contrasts the two services to help you decide which one is right for your project.
AWS CodePipeline is Amazon’s offering in the continuous integration and delivery space. It provides a managed workflow service that allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications with ease. It integrates with various third-party tools such as GitHub, Slack, JIRA, and many others.
The pipeline can be configured to run on an hourly basis or whenever there is a change on a particular branch of code in your repository.
GitHub Actions is a new service from GitHub that lets you automate all aspects of your workflow from building code to deploying it in production environments.
The actions can be triggered by contributors submitting pull requests or pushes to branches on your repositories hosted on GitHub; however, unlike CodePipeline, these actions happen on individual repositories instead of across multiple projects at once time like CodePipeline does (which could be an advantage depending on what kind of workflows you’re looking for).
One important item to compare between these to discuss workflow management and isolated job execution.
Workflow Management
Both AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions offer easy-to-use tools for creating a workflow to run your code through different steps in the CI/CD process. CodePipeline offers more features for visualizing your workflow, while GitHub Actions’ visualizations are less detailed but easier to use.
Isolated Job Execution
GitHub Actions lets you run jobs immediately after they are pushed to a branch, while CodePipeline requires you to wait until all jobs have been completed before starting them again—which means that if one job fails, all other jobs will be stopped as well.
This can be particularly problematic if your build requires access to external resources that may change over time (such as an Amazon S3 bucket).
See Also
Using AWS Code Build for Continuous Integration