Cloud deployment

Interacting with a major cloud provider such as Amazon AWS may have become a much needed task that's part of your delivery process. GitLab is making this process less painful by providing Docker images that come with the needed libraries and tools pre-installed. By referencing them in your CI/CD pipeline, you'll be able to interact with your chosen cloud provider more easily.

AWS

Introduced in GitLab 12.6.

GitLab's AWS Docker image provides the AWS Command Line Interface, which enables you to run aws commands. As part of your deployment strategy, you can run aws commands directly from .gitlab-ci.yml by specifying GitLab's AWS Docker image.

Some credentials are required to be able to run aws commands:

Sign up for an AWS account if you don't have one yet.
Log in onto the console and create a new IAM user.
Select your newly created user to access its details. Navigate to Security credentials > Create a new access key.

NOTE: Note: A new Access key ID and Secret access key pair will be generated. Please take a note of them right away.
In your GitLab project, go to Settings > CI / CD. Set the Access key ID and Secret access key as environment variables, using the following variable names:

Env. variable name Value

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID Your "Access key ID"

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY Your "Secret access key"
You can now use aws commands in the .gitlab-ci.yml file of this project:
```
deploy:
  stage: deploy
  image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/cloud-deploy:latest # see the note below
  script:
    - aws s3 ...
    - aws create-deployment ...
```
NOTE: Note: Please note that the image used in the example above (registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/cloud-deploy:latest) is hosted on the GitLab Container Registry and is ready to use. Alternatively, replace the image with another one hosted on AWS ECR.

Env. variable name	Value
`AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID`	Your "Access key ID"
`AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY`	Your "Secret access key"

AWS ECR

Instead of referencing an image hosted on the GitLab Registry, you are free to reference any other image hosted on any third-party registry, such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

To do so, please make sure to push your image into your ECR repository before referencing it in your .gitlab-ci.yml file and replace the image path to point to your ECR.