The pipeline that we built is fairly fast and robust. Depending on the nature of your service, you may choose to trust the quality of the code produced by your team and always deploy the code straight to production. With sufficient monitoring around your logs and application metrics, you will be able to catch issues minutes after the code is deployed. You can then rely on CodeDeploy and its ability to deploy older releases fast to recover from that situation.
If you take this approach and a problem is detected, simply roll back to a previous version. You may know exactly what's wrong and know that it's easy to fix, but the pressure caused by knowing that there is an ongoing issue impacting users can cause you to make more mistakes, ...
