1. The Challenge: Manual Deployments on AWS

• Pain Points:

  • Time-consuming EB environment setup (VPC, security groups, scaling).

  • No version control for infrastructure.

  • Manual code uploads via AWS Console.

2. Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

• Key Terraform Configurations:

  • S3 Backend: Stored state files securely to enable team collaboration.

      terraform {
        backend "s3" {
          bucket = "my-terraform-state-bucket"
          key    = "elastic-beanstalk/terraform.tfstate"
          region = "us-east-1"
        }
      }
    

  • Elastic Beanstalk Setup: Defined environment, instance type, and auto-scaling.

  • Networking: VPC, subnets, and security groups (restricted to HTTP/HTTPS).

3. CI/CD with Bitbucket Pipelines

• Pipeline Workflow:

  1. Code Push: Triggered pipeline on git push (via VS Code terminal).

  2. Test & Build: Ran npm install and basic smoke tests.

  3. Deploy: Used aws elasticbeanstalk deploy to update the EB environment.

• Sample bitbucket-pipelines.yml:

    image: node:14
    pipelines:
      branches:
        main:
          - step:
              script:
                - npm install
                - npm test
                - zip -r deploy.zip .
                - pipe: atlassian/aws-elasticbeanstalk-deploy:1.1.0
                  variables:
                    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
                    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
                    AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: "us-east-1"
                    APPLICATION_NAME: "my-login-app"
                    ENVIRONMENT_NAME: "login-app-prod"
                    ZIP_FILE: "deploy.zip"
  

4. The Result: Fully Automated Deployments

• Achievements:

  • Infrastructure in Version Control: Terraform files are tracked in Bitbucket.

  • 1-Click Deploys: Code changes are deployed automatically to EB.

  • Cost Savings: Eliminated manual errors and reduced deployment time by 80%.

5. Lessons Learned

• Terraform State: Always use remote backends (S3) to avoid state conflicts.

• Pipeline Security: Store AWS credentials as Bitbucket environment variables.

• EB Extensions: Use .ebextensions/ to customize EB environments (e.g., NGINX configs).

Conclusion

Automating deployments with Terraform and Bitbucket Pipelines turned a tedious process into a seamless workflow. Next up: Adding multi-stage environments (dev/staging/prod).