9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins

Learn how to build a CI/CD pipeline to automate the deployment process of your serverless
applications

Mohamed Labouardy Follow

Nov 4, 2018 · 6 min read

The following post will walk you through how to build a CI/CD pipeline to automate the
deployment process of your Serverless applications and how to use features like code
promotion, rollbacks, versions, aliases and blue/green deployment.

At the end of this post, you will be able to build a pipeline similar to the following gure:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

https://github.com/mlabouardy/lambda-ci

For the sake of simplicity, I wrote a simple Go based Lambda function that calculates the
Fibonacci number:

I implemented also a couple of unit tests for both the Fibonacci recursive and Lambda
handler functions:

To create the function in AWS Lambda and all the necessary AWS services, I used
Terraform. An S3 bucket is needed to store all the deployment packages generated
through the development lifecycle of the Lambda function:

The build server needs to interact with S3 bucket and Lambda functions. Therefore, an
IAM instance role must be created with S3 and Lambda permissions:

An IAM role is needed for the Lambda function as well:

Finally, a Go-based Lambda function will be created with the following properties:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

Next, build the deployment package with the following commands:

Then, issue the terraform apply command to create the resources:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

Terraform output

Sign in to AWS Management Console and navigate to Lambda Console, a new function
called “Fibonacci” should be created:

You can test it out, by mocking the input from the “Select a test event” dropdown list:

If you click on “Test” button the Fibonacci number of 7 will be returned:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

So far our function is working as expected. However, how can we ensure each changes to
our codebase doesn't break things ? That’s where CI/CD comes into play, the idea is
making all code changes and features go through a complex pipeline before integrating
them to the master branch and deploying it to production.

You need a Jenkins cluster with at least a single worker (with Go preinstalled), you can
follow my previous post for a step by step guide on how to build a Jenkins cluster on
AWS from scratch:

Deploy a Jenkins Cluster on AWS — Mohamed Labouardy — Medium

Few months ago, I gave a talk at Nexus User Conference 2018 on how to build
a fully automated CI/CD platform on AWS…

medium.com

Prior to the build, the IAM instance role (created with Terraform) with the write access
to S3 and the update operations to Lambda must be con gured on the Jenkins workers:

Jump back to Jenkins Dashboard and create new multi-branch project and con gure the
GitHub repository where the code source is versioned as follows:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

Create a new le called Jenkins le, it de nes a set of steps that will be executed on
Jenkins (This de nition le must be committed to the Lambda function’s code
repository):

The pipeline is divided into 5 stages:

Checkout: clone the GitHub repository.

Test: check whether our code is well formatted and follows Go best practices and
run unit tests.

Build: build a binary and create the deployment package.

Push: store the deployment package (.zip le) to an S3 bucket.

Deploy: update the Lambda function’s code with the new artifact.

Note the usage of the git commit ID as a name for the deployment package to give a
meaningful and signi cant name for each release and be able to roll back to a speci c
commit if things go wrong.

Once the project is saved, a new pipeline should be created as follows:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

Once the pipeline is completed, all stages should be passed, as shown in the next
screenshot:

At the end, Jenkins will update the Lambda function’s code with the update-function-
code command:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

If you open the S3 Console, then click on the bucket used by the pipeline, a new
deployment package should be stored with a key name identical to the commit ID:

Finally, to make Jenkins trigger the build when you push to the code repository, click on
“Settings” from your GitHub repository, then create a new webhook from “Webhooks”,
and ll it in with a URL similar to the following:

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9/21/2020 CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins | by Mohamed Labouardy | A Cloud Guru

In case you’re using Git branching work ows (you should), Jenkins will discover
automatically the new branches:

Hence, you must separate your deployment environments to test new changes without
impacting your production. Therefore, having multiple versions of your Lambda
functions makes sense.

Update the Jenkins le to add a new stage to publish a new Lambda function’s version,
every-time you push (or merge) to the master branch:

On the master branch, a new stage called “Published” will be added:

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As a result, a new version will be published based on the master branch source code:

However, in agile based environment (Extreme programming). The development team

needs to release iterative versions of the system often to help the customer to gain
con dence in the progress of the project, receive feedback and detect bugs in earlier
stage of development.

As a result, small releases can be frequent:

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AWS services using Lambda functions as downstream resources (API Gateway as an

example) need to be updated every-time a new version is published -> operational
overhead and downtime. USE aliases !!!

The alias is a pointer to a speci c version, it allows you to promote a function from one
environment to another (such as staging to production). Aliases are mutable, unlike
versions, which are immutable.

That being said, create an alias for the production environment that points to the latest
version published using the AWS command line:

You can now easily promote the latest version published into production by updating the
production alias pointer’s value:

Like what you’re reading? Check out my book and learn how to build, secure, deploy and
manage production-ready Serverless applications in Golang with AWS Lambda.

Hands-On Serverless Applications with Go | PACKT Books

Learn to build, secure, deploy, and manage your serverless application in
Golang with AWS Lambda

www.packtpub.com

Drop your comments, feedback, or suggestions below — or connect with me directly on

Twitter @mlabouardy.

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AWS Serverless Cloud Computing Programming Golang

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