Building a Complete CI/CD Pipeline for EKS with AWS ECR, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and Helm

In the world of cloud-native development, automation is essential. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) providing a suite of services like Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Registry (ECR), CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and Helm, you can automate the entire lifecycle of a containerized application — right from building Docker images to deploying them on a Kubernetes cluster.

This blog will walk you through the complete CI/CD pipeline setup for deploying Docker applications on EKS using AWS services, focusing on best practices, security, and scalability.

Overview of the Setup

We will cover:

1. Setting up EKS: Using AWS-managed Kubernetes service.
2. Building and pushing Docker images to ECR: Storing your application images securely.
3. Helm for Kubernetes deployment: Managing complex Kubernetes applications.
4. Automating CI/CD with CodePipeline and CodeBuild: Building and deploying containerized apps automatically.
5. Best practices for securing and scaling: Ensuring your application remains performant and secure.

Detailed Project Structure

To ensure maintainability and scalability, follow this modular project structure. This structure allows you to handle everything from your application code, Docker setup, Helm charts, and infrastructure as code.

my-app/
├── app/                            # Application source code
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── app.py
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── tests/                      # Test files for unit testing the app
│   └── requirements.txt            # Python dependencies
├── Dockerfile                       # Docker configuration for the app
├── infrastructure/                  # Infrastructure as code
│   ├── eks/
│   │   ├── eks-cluster.tf           # EKS setup using Terraform
│   │   └── iam-policies.tf          # IAM roles and policies for EKS
│   ├── ecr/
│   │   └── ecr.tf                   # ECR setup for storing Docker images
│   ├── pipeline/                    # CI/CD pipeline infrastructure
│   │   ├── codepipeline.tf          # CodePipeline setup
│   │   ├──…