AWS CodeBuild

What do you like best?

Ability to spawn a build on-demand, via the API, CLI (aws codebuild), or the web console

Consistent performance across builds, with options for artifact caching etc.

Support for a wide range of source repositories: GitHub, CodeCommit, etc.

Ability to upload build artifacts directly to S3 or CodePipeline

Simple YAML-based build configuration with clear pre- and post-build actions

No maintenance cost or overhead; pay only for the duration of your individual builds!

What do you dislike?

AWS Free Tier: https://aws.amazon.com/free/#AWS_CodeBuild_ only offers 100 minutes of build time per month, which means you'll have to allocate a budget if you integrate CodeBuild with any kind of frequently-invoked CI/CD

Private repositories are not fully supported yet (except for AWS-native CodeCommit)

Lacks flexibility as there is only a single build step (with a single container image); if you want to customize the steps you will probably need to create and host your own container image containing all the required utility programs/tools/commands.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you need regular builds, it may be beneficial to set up artifact/dependency caching at CodeBuild project level in order to reduce build time.

Note that private repositories (e.g. on GitHub) may not be supported.

If you use S3 (or any other storage-as-a-service solution) as the build target, make sure you have a mechanism to clean up old build artifacts as otherwise you'll end up with lots of garbage.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Performing builds in our own serverless IDE Sigma, on behalf of our users.

It means we don't have to manage or pay for a dedicated build server, and users can build their projects right within their own AWS accounts without disclosing their sources to a third party service.

The free tier pretty much eliminates user-side costs, and we can ask CodeBuild to directly upload the build artifacts to S3, which we can then use in the deployment process.