What is the difference between @aws-cdk/pipelines and @aws-cdk/aws-codepipeline?

Question

These two packages seem to largely do the same thing? What is the intended difference between these two packages and also which should I be using?

Answer 1

Pipelines is the newer experimental library. It has additional constructs like "SimpleSynth" and can do things like check the code for the pipeline and update the pipeline along with deploying your code/infrastructure. It incorporates a lot of CodePipelineActions into the same constructs that create the stages - I suppose the idea is to remove a little of the customization to make it a bit easier to code (generally curs the number of instantiation in half of various constructs)

In most cases, it's kinda overkill. Plus until you and your team have a lot of Base knowledge of cdk it can be dangerous - thr self mutating aspect of your pipeline being able to update and mutate itself when you update your source (a thing that CICD likes) can mean if you make a mistake you can lock your app out of deploying.

Also it's still experimental - meaning they may break dependencies or invalidate older methods at any time.

I'd stick with CodePipeline and CodePipelineActions until you're very comfortable with using cdk and using it for a pipeline in general before experimenting with Pipelines (and generally any library that doesn't start with aws! Except Core most of those are experimental )