AWS CodePipeline with CodeBuild supports GitHub webhooks, export artifacts between stages, many types of caching (S3 artifact caching, Docker caching, file/volume caching), Secrets Manager environment variable integration, queueing between stages, pipeline retries, stage retries, manual approval steps, integration with CloudWatch and many of services like Lambda, and provisioning all of the above via API, CLI, SDK, or CloudFormation.
Doesn't it only support a queue depth of 1 at each stage? Last I checked, if you have a change that is queued up waiting to get into a stage, and a newer change comes along, that newer change will supersede the old one. That makes CodePipeline only good for workflows where you only care about deploying the 'newest' of something.
I think the worst thing about CodePipeline is how hard they make it to run custom code from your pipeline. Your options are Lambda (limited to 15 minutes per run, or you have to rewrite your Lambda function to be called once every 30 seconds, essentially using the first run to start your deployment and every subsequent run to check to see if it's done yet or not) or CodePipeline Custom Actions (where you have to write the AWS SDK code for interacting with CodePipeline).
The AWS Developer Tools team could learn a thing or two from Azure Pipelines. They did it "right", IMO: you can create a 'bash' stage in your pipeline which runs whatever script you want from the build agent (which can either be hosted my Microsoft or hosted yourself). That's all I really want. CodePipeline could support that with a custom action but it's more stuff that I would have to set up.
And the beauty of CodeBuild is that if you need a custom build environment just for your special snowflake build, it’s as easy as creating a Docker container and it won’t interfere with anyone else’s build environment.
