AWS CI/CD Setup: How Docker and CodeBuild Fit Into Your Pipeline

Before building an AWS CI/CD pipeline, developers need to set up Docker, a tool that packages applications and their dependencies into portable images to ensure consistent behaviour across environments. Docker Hub serves as a registry for storing and sharing these images, similar to how GitHub stores source code. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed service that automatically compiles code, runs tests, and builds Docker images whenever new code is pushed to a repository. Within the pipeline, AWS CodePipeline acts as the coordinator, while CodeBuild handles the actual build work inside a temporary cloud environment that AWS provisions and removes after each run. A key configuration file called buildspec.yml instructs CodeBuild on the exact steps to execute during the build process.