Working with manual approvals for multiple builds in AWS CodePipeline

Question

We have a CodePipeline set up to do a build, deploy to a QA ECS environment, then a manual approval step to deploy to Prod.

What gets confusing though, is when there are

Answer 1

I had the same problem. Manual approvals are confusing since several pipeline executions can get queued and it's easy to lose track of things. I think we can blame this on CodePipeline's bad UX.

The workaround I settled with is to have two identical pipelines for the same project. They have the same source stage (same repo/branch) but different deploy stages (one deploys to QA, one deploys to prod). No more manual approval stages. The QA pipeline is set to auto-execute when changes in the source (repo/branch) are detected while the Prod pipeline needs to be manually released.

Basically, we replaced the Manual Approval with Manual Release. Manual release always releases the latest from source unlike manual approvals.