We are now ready to add a new stage to our pipeline that will deploy our application to production. We will create the first action in this stage, which creating a CloudFormation change set.
In the pipeline details view for your pipeline, click on the Edit button and add a new stage called Production after the dev stage, and then add an action to the new stage:
In the Add action dialog box, you need to create an action that is similar to the deploy action that you created for the dev stage, with a few variations:
If you compare the deploy action configuration for the dev stage, with the new create change set action configuration as shown in the preceding screenshot, the configuration is very similar, except for the following key differences:
- Action mode: You configure this as create or replace a change set, which, instead of deploying the stack, will just create a new change set.
- Stack name: Because this action relates to our production environment, you need to configure a new stack name, which we will call todobackend-prod.
- Change set name: This defines a name for the change set. I typically just name this the same as the stack name, given that the action will create or replace the change set on each execution.
- Template configuration: Here, you need to reference the new prod.json file that you added to the todobackend-aws repository in the earlier example, as this holds the input parameters specific to your production environment. This file is made available via the DeploymentRepository artifact that is created from the todobackend-aws repository.
Next, you need to scroll down, expand the Advanced section, configure the Parameter overrides property using the Fn::GetParam syntax, and finally, configure both the ApplicationVersion and DeploymentRepository artifacts as input artifacts. This is identical to the configuration that you performed earlier, for the dev/deploy action.