CI/CD Pipeline using Github Actions to build and deploy an Angular (as AWS S3 Website) + Spring Boot (as AWS Fargate Task) app [including CloudFormation for IaC]

Repository Organization

• /web-frontend - Angular app that you can build running ng build
• /api-service - Spring Boot app that you can build runing mvnw package
• /aws - Contains the cloudformation-template.yml and some useful aws-cli commands to rememeber
• /.github/workflows - contains the Github Actions pipeline files

CI/CD Pipeline Design

This pipeline was designed to be more didatic then "real life". The main reason is that I'd like to highlight the difference between infrastruture changes and application changes.

The following workflow represents a common interaction between the the infrastructure deployment (and its artifacts) and the application deployment:

It's expected that many app deployments are performed on each infrastructure version.

It's possible to use many different strategies to manage that (e.g.: always-check-and-update-everything), I prefered do somenthing more controlled and branch-driven, I explain:

• on PUSH events on infra branch: update only the infrastructure (use Cloudformation to update stack)
• on PUSH events on main branch: update only the application (re-deploy frontend and backend apps)

Infra workflow ( see /.github/workflows/infra.yml)

This workflow has only one job (infra-update) tha basically run the command:

aws cloudformation update-stack --stack-name STACKNAME --template-body cloudformation-template.yml

See the diagram os the /aws/cloudformation-template.yml:

Besides the network components created to give access to the ECS Task, this stack is composed by:

• 1 S3 Bucket (WebSiteBucket) - used to store and serve the frontend (Angular app)
• 1 ECR Repository (CF01APIImageRepository) - used as the Docker registry to store the API Service versions as docker images
• 1 ECS Cluster (CF01ECSCluster) - Mandatory to deploy Fargate containers
• 1 ECS Service (CF01ECSServiceAPI) - Belongs to the ECS cluster, is used to run the tasks

Web Frontend workflow ( see /.github/workflows/webfrontend.yml)

This workflow has two jobs:

• build:

  • build the Angular Application (ng build)
  • zip the dist folder and updaload as artifact

• deploy:

  • dowload and unzip the zipped dist (stored on the build step)
  • dinamically find the bucket ID using AWS CLI (e.g.: aws cloudformation describe-stack-resource --stack-name cf01 --logical-resource-id WebSiteBucket --query StackResourceDetail.PhysicalResourceId --output text)
  • Sync dist content with de S3 bucket

API Service (backend) workflow ( see /.github/workflows/apiservice.yml)

It's important to remember that the AWS ECS Best Practices Guide recommends to update Fargate Tasks in the following way:

Following their recommendations, this workflow has two jobs:

• build:

  • build the Spring Application as a Docker image using the commit SHA as tag
  • push the app Docker image in the ECR repository

• deploy:

  • register a new Task Definition with the last app image
  • find the new Task Definition ARN (using AWS CLI)
  • update the ECS Service with the new Task Definition