AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that you can use to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release your application software. This is made possible by building pipelines that contain one or more stages. The stages can be broadly classified as build, where the code is compiled and built using, say, AWS CodeBuild or some other third-party tool, staging, and deployment, where the code is pushed on to compute instances using AWS CodeDeploy, and so on. Each stage internally describes a set of actions that it needs to perform in order to prepare the software for its release. This action can be anything from building your source code from a Git repository, to making changes to a file, or deploying packages, and so on. Every change made to either your code or some configurational setting within CodePipeline is considered as a revision and you can have multiple such revisions created within a single stage of a pipeline.

You can use these features provided by CodePipeline to effectively manage and monitor the release of your software. In this section, we will be continuing with our use case set up earlier using CodeCommit and CodeDeploy and see how we can truly build an end-to-end continuous delivery cycle using AWS CodePipeline.