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

Well, we can solve this problem as how you describe it with development, but it might also be a process glitch.

For example: If we have a development branch, a release branch (staging) and a master branch ( production ) we could easily solve this issue.

Development branch Things we develop will be going through the development branch stage where we don't need the manual approval, as we don't want to check every changes. We have setup automated unit tests for that.

Release branch This will deploy to the staging environment where we extensively test the software quality, also based on the regression tests on an acceptance chain with acceptance systems. This should prevent all the big issues before merging towards master branch. Next to that, we could also manually test the release branch on the staging environment. If this works, be happy and easily migrate towards master

Master branch This will deploy to the production environment with a manual approval before the actual deployment is taking place, knowing for sure you will only push 1 change, being the merge from release to master, preventing the issues you've summarized in the ticket.

Another way is to develop a new AWS feature where you can uncheck or check a checkbox saying: always take the latest release, but that will not help adding value to the pipeline integration as things will be pushed without testing well enough.