Cross-Cloud CI/CD in Action: Jenkins on GCP Deploying to AWS

Automate App Deployments Across Cloud Platforms Seamlessly

1. Problem Statement

In modern DevOps environments, organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud architectures to optimize for performance, cost, and compliance. However, this introduces significant challenges in maintaining a unified and efficient CI/CD pipeline that spans across cloud boundaries. Most traditional CI/CD solutions are designed to operate within a single cloud ecosystem, creating silos between development and deployment environments when different cloud platforms are involved.

The specific problem this use case addresses is:

"How can we design and implement a secure, reliable, and automated CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that can deploy and manage application updates to a production environment running on Amazon Web Services (AWS EC2)?"

This challenge involves solving real-world complexities such as:

• Secure cross-cloud communication between Jenkins and remote EC2 instances

• Automation of app packaging, deployment, and service management

• Triggering builds from GitHub events and ensuring seamless deployment flow

• Overcoming network, permission, and infrastructure compatibility issues between clouds

This use case provides a practical, hands-on solution to building cloud-agnostic DevOps pipelines, a skill set that is increasingly demanded by modern IT organizations and a common topic in DevOps/SRE interviews.

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2. Why We Need This Use Case

In today’s increasingly hybrid cloud landscape, enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud strategy to leverage the unique strengths of different cloud providers. For example, an organization might choose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its superior data analytics tools and AWS for its reliable compute infrastructure. However, with this hybrid architecture comes the need for seamless CI/CD pipelines that work across clouds.

Traditional DevOps pipelines typically operate within a single cloud environment, but cross-cloud CI/CD enables flexibility, redundancy, and optimal cost management. This use case showcases how Jenkins, hosted on a GCP virtual machine, can be used to deploy a Python Flask application onto an AWS EC2 instance. It provides a practical implementation of cross-cloud deployment, serving as a blueprint for scalable, cloud-agnostic DevOps workflows.

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3. When We Need This Use Case