End-to-End CI/CD & Dynamic Environment Creation on AWS with Jenkins, ArgoCD, EKS & Terraform

Company Overview

The financial services and digital payments customer needed a more automated approach to its infrastructure, requiring a secure, scalable, and fully automated CI/CD pipeline with dynamic environments and GitOps delivery on AWS.

Challenges Faced

The financial services and digital payments customer needed a more automated approach to its infrastructure, requiring a secure, scalable, and fully automated CI/CD pipeline with dynamic environments and GitOps delivery on AWS.

Solution And Implementation

Strategy:

Design and implement a fully automated CI/CD + GitOps platform on AWS, with dynamic infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, and ArgoCD for declarative Kubernetes delivery.

Implementation Stack

Component Tool/Service
CI Pipelines Jenkins (Declarative Pipelines)
CD & GitOps ArgoCD
Code Quality SonarQube (Jenkins integrated)
IaC & Infra Terraform + AWS Modules
Clusters Amazon EKS
Database RDS MySQL (restored from snapshot)
Cache ElastiCache Redis
Dynamic Envs Terraform + CI params (per PR)

Key Steps:

Jenkins CI Pipeline

  • Triggered on Git events (PR open, merge)

  • Steps:

    • Lint → Unit Test → Build Docker Image

    • Run SonarQube analysis

    • Push to ECR

    • Run Integration Tests

    • Trigger ArgoCD sync (via Git push to infra repo)

SonarQube Integration

  • Jenkins pipeline includes SonarQube scanner step

  • Quality gates enforced: coverage, complexity,security, duplication

  • PRs failed automatically if thresholds missed

Terraform for Infra

  • Modular setup for:

    • VPC, Subnets, IAM roles

    • RDS MySQL and ElastiCache Redis (with restore from snapshot)

    • EKS Cluster (autoscaled, private/public split)

  • Environment names dynamically generated from Git branch/PR number

  • Destroyed on merge/close if not main/staging

Dynamic Environments (Per Branch/PR)

  • Jenkins triggers Terraform with vars:

    • env=feature/ABC-123

  • Terraform provisions:

    • New namespace in EKS

    • New DB & Redis instances (restored from latest snapshot)

    • DNS routing via Route 53 (abc123.dev.client.com)

  • On merge/close: infra destroyed, costs saved

ArgoCD GitOps Sync

  • Each env has an Application manifest in the GitOps repo

  • Jenkins updates values.yaml or image.tag

  • ArgoCD detects Git change and auto-syncs to EKS

EKS Workloads

  • Microservices deployed via Helm charts

  • Secrets from AWS Secrets Manager

  • Namespaced per environment

Results

Metric Before After
Env provision time ~6-12 hours (manual) ~12 minutes (automated)
CI/CD deployment time ~30 minutes ~6–8 minutes
Static analysis enforcement Manual, occasional Enforced per PR
DB refresh per test env Rare, manual SQL import Snapshot restored on each env
GitOps visibility None Full live sync in ArgoCD
Resource cleanup Rarely done Auto-destroyed after PR close

Conclusion

This engagement delivered a highly automated, test-friendly, and production-aligned pipeline for a critical fintech system. The result:

  • Git-driven, self-service environments

  • Secure, traceable deployments

  • Clean integration of CI, CD, IaC, and quality gates

  • Faster iteration without infrastructure bottlenecks

The platform remains extensible, scalable, and cost-efficient thanks to automation of teardown and reuse of DB snapshots.