Working with manual approvals for multiple builds in AWS CodePipeline

I had the same problem. Manual approvals are confusing since several pipeline executions can get queued and it's easy to lose track of things. I think we can blame this on CodePipeline's bad UX.

The workaround I settled with is to have two identical pipelines for the same project. They have the same source stage (same repo/branch) but different deploy stages (one deploys to QA, one deploys to prod). No more manual approval stages. The QA pipeline is set to auto-execute when changes in the source (repo/branch) are detected while the Prod pipeline needs to be manually released.

Basically, we replaced the Manual Approval with Manual Release. Manual release always releases the latest from source unlike manual approvals.

You should place the deploy and approval action in the same stage. This lets you approve exactly what you tested. Why? Because exactly one pipeline execution can be in a pipeline stage at any given time.

...approve the latest build, in case the earlier builds had issues that were fixed by the later builds.

If you want to let later builds catch up, reject the earlier build that is waiting for approval.