13 ms·

CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Applications on AWS

572 points by jeffbarr 9y ago

patrickg_zill 9y ago
Basically more lockin to a single cloud provider.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I would say it's the complete opposite of lock-in. If more cloud providers follow suit, then one day you might be able to simply `git push` to a different provider, then wipe away all your old infrastructure. I'm overstating things, but 12 factor apps should be very easy to migrate, excluding things like databases, DNS records, user roles, etc. But I think this might already be true if you're comparing Heroku with AWS.
  - problems 9y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the build and deployment steps are being managed via Amazon-specific tools directly, which want you only to use Amazon-specific services, no? That sounds like lock-in to me. It's pretty trivial to do this kind of thing with Jenkins or Gitlab CI and those don't have that issue. And then you can deploy however you want to any provider.
    - matthewaveryusa 9y ago
      build an interface around it and then make one AWS implementation and one jenkins/gitlab ci implementation? You only lock yourself in if you allow yourself to lock yourself in.
    - nathan_f77 9y ago
      Sure, but Heroku also manages all your build and deployment steps. Migrating away from Heroku is as easy as pushing your code somewhere else, then deleting the app on Heroku. Ideally all of these build and deployment steps are automated for you, because let's face it, most web applications and APIs have very, very similar hosting requirements. Maybe I don't really understand the concept of lock-in. I've never felt "locked in" to anything on AWS, unless you're talking about contracts for reserved instances.
      - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
        Lambda is a good example. You can't pick up and move a lambda solution to another provider without significant overhead, the lock in. Architecturely, migrating a lambda to another compute platform shouldn't be too difficult if its structured well and functionally, but it's still work that would need to be done.
    - bentruyman 9y ago
      From what I can tell, this is a web interface wrapper around a suite of Amazon tools – but nothing is forcing you to exclusively use them once you've created your project. > It's pretty trivial to do this kind of thing with Jenkins or Gitlab CI I think you might be trivializing what's being offered here. This is bigger than a CI server.
      - jmagoon 9y ago
        Can you help me understand what is being offered here? Is it basically a wrapper for, in the Rails world, spin up EC2 instance -> install make / git -> clone repo -> bundle install -> install nginx -> configure nginx to whatever app server they have decided you will be using -> set up CI server? I wonder if you can customize how the recipe gets built? It basically just seems like an AWS specific deployment recipe as a service for people who might not be familiar with a tool like Ansible. Is that accurate?
- kt9 9y ago
  If you're worried about lock-in checkout https://www.distelli.com https://www.distelli.com. Disclaimer: I'm the founder at distelli
startupdiscuss 9y ago
Is this eventually going to compete with Cloud9, Koding, and other cloud IDEs?
- puzzle 9y ago
  Amazon bought Cloud9 last year...
  - startupdiscuss 9y ago
    I did not realize that. Surprised they don't plug that in front of this.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      You can assume it's only a matter of time.
- kevindqc 9y ago
  I don't think it is a cloud IDE since it asks you to choose between Visual Studio/Eclipse/Command-line to edit code? It seems to just be something that makes it easier to get started with AWS. A bit like how you can choose Azure when creating new projects in Visual Studio, which will take care of Azure-related boilerplate
  - startupdiscuss 9y ago
    I think you're right.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
morinted 9y ago
We'll need a new entry added to AWS in Plain English: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
- kmfrk 9y ago
  They should just hire someone to explain these things. A video goes a long way.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    A video goes a long way. As long as there is a text with pictures for weird video adverse engineers like me. I actively avoid videos.
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      I don't think you're weird. Instructional or informational videos force their pacing on you. Text and images allow you to learn at your own pace, be it faster or slower than a video. Few things are more frustrating than having to skip back 15 seconds multiple times in a video because I didn't quite get something, or trying to hunt around ahead in the timeline because the current stuff being presented is trivial introductory fluff.
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      I am the same. Give me text! I skip around all over the place, and can (occasionally) read (short) paragraphs in a glance. Videos and their enforced pacing :/
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      Seems I'm not alone. 25 upvotes at the moment :-| Now I'm not against videos, I just want good text (not just transcripts) to be available for people like me.
- scalatohaskell 9y ago
  thats great link, thanks
rajathagasthya 9y ago
Does this take away the need for customers to develop their own tooling to interact with various AWS services? It's hard to understand what this is doing.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  My understanding is that this is like Heroku, except there's no additional charge, and you have full access to all of the services underneath in case you need to customize something.
- aeleos 9y ago
  It seems like this is a tool that simplify the process of creating and managing services to help speed up the development process, while still leaving the typical services that AWS provides available.
draw_down 9y ago
Would it be unkind to suggest that they could look into hiring a designer or two?
- cwyers 9y ago
  "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Ah yes, I do recall reading that. And now they're proudly launching products with shit like this: https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/AWS%20CodeStar-01-CodeStarWorkflow.png https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/AWS%20CodeStar... I get that the graphics aren't the important part, but jeez.
    - nailer 9y ago
      UX is more than graphics. But yes, if AWS had any kind of sense of UX, DigitalOcean wouldn't exist.
      - geoka9 9y ago
        > UX is more than graphics I'd say they are orthogonal. Craigslist's graphics are bad/nonexistent but I like its UX a lot.
    - jeffbarr 9y ago
siliconc0w 9y ago
Nice - though a lot of these Code* products still seem fairly half baked compared to their dedicated competitors. I kinda wish AWS would launch fewer better products than so many mediocre ones.
brilliantcode 9y ago
I think this coupled with their acquisition of c9.io is beginning to look like a real "cloud killer app". My vision for AWS is being able to login to AWS and see c9 with one click deploy and configuration. I'm patiently awaiting for this. It was one thing that really woke me up to Azure with their wizard form directly from Visual Studio. After AWS reinvent 2016, the Azurphoria wore off and I was an AWS fanboy once more. Having the ability to edit/deploy inside my browser would be a huge tide turning moment.
sigden 9y ago
Looks like they're still working out some kinks. Getting a nice 500 error from the management console.
zifnab06 9y ago
So...Spinnaker except with vendor lock in.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
quaunaut 9y ago
From what I'm reading, this sounds quite a bit like Heroku-style functionality for AWS. Git push is your entire process to deploying a new build, without needing to set up a deployment pipeline, while having the usual escape hatches for deployment that the AWS toolchain has. Definitely a cool thing, a good way to have something that's easy to start with, but as you need a more complex infrastructure would let you add it as necessary without incurring the usual "learn everything at once" cost.
mcjiggerlog 9y ago
Looks like they're trying to compete with Heroku. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Doesn't quite look like they've nailed the ease-of-use quite in the way Heroku have yet, however.
nathan_f77 9y ago
This looks amazing. When it matures, this is probably going to kill Heroku. This may also mean that I will never have to touch devops again. I may never have to use Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, and all that other stuff. At least, not for small to medium-sized deployments. It also means that I'll never need to touch Dokku or Flynn. I was about to say that some company just wasted a lot of money on Deis, but then I remembered that it was Microsoft. So maybe that was a good move, although I feel like Azure is the Bing of cloud providers. I'm actually angry that this took so long. This should have been available 5 years ago.
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  > I may never have to use Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, and all that other stuff. True, you may never have to as long as you're okay putting 100% of your faith in the benevolence of a single company. Remember, a good portion of AWS services are completely proprietary and serve as a pretty fancy set of golden, jewel-encrusted handcuffs. Fully open source projects like those you mentioned, on the other hand, are positioning developers who know them to treat the cloud providers of today as just another source of CPU cycles, storage, and networking. For the services I run on Kubernetes in AWS, I can lift and shift those in a day if/when the day comes that Amazon is a little less benevolent with their pricing and service levels. If we were asked to do the same with our services built expecting AWS functionality, it would takes months to years. Guaranteed. Yes, there's a trade-off that I don't get 100% managed services and I have to know a little about the workings of the platform, but I would make that same commitment to AWS the second it didn't do everything for me. In my experience, that moment usually occurs somewhere around the 10-minute mark. Amazon is great today, but Bezos won't live forever and who knows what happens when his successor takes over. It could be great, or it could be a mass exodus of people dumping years of investment. Personally, I'd rather hedge my bets and use their low-cost VMs as my source of compute today, but leave myself plenty of dead-simple exit options and sleep a little more easily at night. That's what open source software is all about.
  - meddlepal 9y ago
    The problem is, most people won't work for a company long enough to see your hypothetical doomsday scenario (if it even does). The people who will be screwed are not likely the ones making the decisions today.
kotojo 9y ago
Would this make for a good way to get into aws/devops since it narrows the perspective of their services? I have no experience with devops and want to learn to manage my applications directly (mostly use services like now or heroku currently), but looking at learning aws always seemed intimidating with the 600 different services they run.
- AlexB138 9y ago
  >Would this make for a good way to get into aws/devops since it narrows the perspective of their services? It depends what you mean by that. In a big way, this negates the need for a dedicated Ops engineer for small to medium deployments on AWS. If you're a developer looks to operate your own small application, this is a great entry point.
  - eropple 9y ago
    > this negates the need for a dedicated Ops engineer for small to medium deployments on AWS Ops people were already largely negated in small to medium deployments. This doesn't change much about that. Developers who can handle operations tasks are, as always, in huge demand.
old-gregg 9y ago
They keep climbing up the stack. The final step would be to provide ready-to-go outsourced development teams. Maybe they should acquire Gigster to plug the last gap. ;)
angryasian 9y ago
I don't care about lock in, and I just want something secure and easy to deploy an application. Pricing is important, but heroku gets expensive fast, and I'd eventually like something that I can manage myself once released and I can dedicate more time to. I think this looks great.
- late2part 9y ago
  How long does it take AWS to get expensive compared to Heroku?
  - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
    Depends on market factors. Supply and demand and all that. AWS has created a situation where, from the consumer POV, they have infinite supply to meet whatever demand. Or maybe there is just so much slack in a data center system that it feels that way. The real question is what does the cloud platform future look like when that slack goes away, but I think we're pretty far from that reality.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    As a small point of comparison, redis on Heroku is $200/month for a gig of memory. 1.55G (cache.t2.small) on elasticache is $24/month. For redis at least, the difference is an order of magnitude.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      The t2.small will kick you in the pants in two spots, FWIW: compute and bandwidth. The first probably won't matter for a redis cluster, but the second could definitely hurt. Amazon refuses to be pinned down on how small (it's "low to moderate" bandwidth on their instance matrix), but you will feel the pinch with extended usage. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-matrix https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-mat...
      - bpicolo 9y ago
Alir3z4 9y ago
AWS has a lot of resource to build something "easy to work with" like heroku, but it doesn't. Maybe CodeStar is an attempt ? CodeStar is more like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the one that I still don't know how to take it into my toolchain and development flow. Now AWS CodeStar, that requires bunch of clicks, wizards, permissions configuration, choosing a template and then another changes... To get started with they needed to show bunch of screenshots, while something like Heroku would tell how to use the whole thing in 2-3 commands in terminal. That's all. However, I hope something like CodeStar get more polished and mature so I can move have one place to bill and one thing to worry about and not docker, kubernetes, mesos, ansible, ssh into machine, database backups, etc... edit: Just found out for web applications they use Elastic Beanstalk as deploy step.
neom 9y ago
I'm very curious to see how abstract aws is going to end up getting, would they build a browser (call an aws app directly-ish or something..?)? IMO There is a paradigm shift a-brewing and it doesn't look good for most of the clouds/vps providers.
seneca 9y ago
That sound you hear is thousands of Ops Engineers' future prospects falling further and further into question. It's becoming hard for me to justify staying in the 'DevOps' space with amazing solutions like this coming out regularly from AWS. I can hitch myself to the AWS wagon for a while, but eventually, it seems, dedicated operators just won't be needed for most small to medium deployments. It's tough, because I can see that this is genuinely moving the industry forward, but it's also negating the need for skills I've worked for over a decade to build. I guess this is what carriage builders felt like 100 years ago.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Eh. The further AWS moves up the stack, the less dominating their products are. EC2? Awesome. S3? Great. ELB? Good. CodeCommit? Eh. I'd be interested to hear about experiences using CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, etc. but I doubt AWS found the One True Workflow.
  - taurath 9y ago
    The more tooling you get around the higher level products, the more whole industries you will capture, at least in part. So many startups are just services adding a bit in the middle of AWS and clients, value that is slowly chipped away by Amazon. Instead of the "full team" you now have an automated lightweight SaaS. AWS's strategy is not looking for the one true workflow, its to envelop enough common usecases that it dominates nearly the whole field, giving you as custom a service as you want.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      Totally agreed. I call it the "Atlassian strategy": be mediocre at enough things that you become enormously successful. It's a long way from a death knell to competitors though.
  - Androider 9y ago
    This does seem to be the case. CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy feel like (and most likely were) developed by entirely different teams, and the actual experience of using any of them is not as good as your average 3rd party provider that fully focuses on just one of the pieces. The main thing the AWS equivalents have going for them at this time is the ultra-low pricing (by selling the underlying AWS services, and mostly not charging for the Code* tools).
jorjordandan 9y ago
Amazon's design language is very meh. Even if you aren't in a cubicle, as soon as you are on their website, you feel like you are in a cubicle. With bad lighting. Heroku is way ahead in this regard. (not saying that is the most important consideration)
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Even if you aren't in a cubicle, as soon as you are on their website, you feel like you are in a cubicle. With bad lighting. " This really made me laugh out loud, so thank you. I understand exactly what you mean and I agree. Cheers.
- refrigerator 9y ago
  You've summed up my thoughts on AWS's design in a way that I never would have been able to - thanks.
smagch 9y ago
Are there any differences between Cloud Deployment Manager which GCP offer? https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/ https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/
GordonS 9y ago
At a glance, this seems very similar to functionality that has existed in Azure for a very long time (templates in multiple languages, automated build and deployment, monitoring). Not sure why Azure gets so little love here on HN! I don't mean to knock it, it's great to see this functionality make it to AWS, I was just wondering if there were any significant differences to Azure's offering?
- intrasight 9y ago
  I agree on both points. It would be a great contribution of someone could write a technical review which compares and contrasts the two offerings.
- kirse 9y ago
  Apparently Azure has been sneaking these features in over the past year or so... I do .NET dev on a daily basis on self-hosted infrastructure and was aware of VSTS and such, but after looking at it now I can safely say that back in early 2016, Azure was nothing like what I'm seeing now. Back then the Dashboard was a steaming pile of Javascript and the TFS / VSTS split had just started. The new Portal appears to be much faster and it looks like they have much better docs: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/apps/aspnet/aspnetcore-to-azure https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/apps/aspnet/as... (Thanks for the heads up)
bushin 9y ago
Where have all the devops gone?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lojack 9y ago
  DevOps is a set of practices we should all be using, not a job title. Operations Engineer would be a better title, and they aren't ever going anywhere. DevOps Engineer is a job title -- one that I'm not a big fan of.
randomsofr 9y ago
I wish it supported Golang
skybrian 9y ago
As someone who's happy with Google App Engine for simple apps, is this in any way comparable?
morgante 9y ago
I'm excited to see Amazon entering this space since I think far too much time is spent on setting up and managing devops tools, especially for small and medium-sized projects. [0] I've personally wasted lots of time on repetitively setting up CI/CD, autoscaling, and other basic infrastructure for different companies and projects. Anything Amazon can do to reclaim that time (and encourage more people to adopt best practices) is awesome. That being said, after poking around I have a few criticisms: 1. It doesn't seem like the example templates include Docker. At this point, I think Docker should be considered a must-have for any new ops tool. It makes your application much more portable and eases the learning curve for new developers. 2. Getting things set up and working is still too complex. It took me 20 minutes to get my first project working fully (even just using their standard tools). 3. There doesn't seem to be any ability to bring in an existing project. It'd be awesome if I could just provide a GitHub URL and Amazon would automatically set up all the ops tools I need to have a production-ready deployment of that project. I welcome the competition though. Let humans focus on unique work while computers automate things. [0] In fact, I founded my startup on that premise: http://getgandalf.com/ http://getgandalf.com/
kwahyaj 9y ago
So this is pretty much AWS's answer to IBM Bluemix DevOps pipeline https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started
chuparkoff 9y ago
Wow, this does look awesome. Btw, it doesn't look like they’re promoting this in a huge way, but it just showed up in my feed that Atlassian is offering a free new JIRA Software license if you sign up from within CodeStar. I've been using Atlassian stuff since 2007 and I don't think I’ve ever seen them do this before. I don’t think there’s a free version of JIRA? Has anyone ever seen that before? Pretty sweet! https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953 https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953
- SanDimasFootbal 9y ago
  Alexa, can you fix these $&@#%* bugs for me now?
  - chuparkoff 9y ago
    hahaha. iseewhatyoudidthere
- obiefernandez 9y ago
  In other words, JIRA has gotten so bad they can't even get people to pay for it anymore.
hbcondo714 9y ago
No .NET / C# template (yet) but the author selected to use Visual Studio as the IDE.
- bigtones 9y ago
  Hopefully .Net / C# is coming soon. I was really excited, but when they announced supported languages/platforms was a little disappointed.
  - hbcondo714 9y ago
    > AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2015 Me too. Hopefully support for Visual Studio 2017 will come out soon as the toolkit for it is still in preview[1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-of-the-aws-toolkit-for-visual-studio-2017/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-of-the-aws-to...
- nhebb 9y ago
  I was surprised by that. Since Microsoft has been pushing Azure hard the last few years, you'd think Amazon would battle back and come out swinging with a C# template.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jrowley 9y ago
I feel for the skyliner folks today, but their product still looks better/more feature filled than aws's native offering. https://www.skyliner.io/ https://www.skyliner.io/
- precipice 9y ago
  Nice of you to say, thanks. (I work on Skyliner.)
  - pedalpete 9y ago
    I hadn't heard of skyliner before. You guys may be a bit scared but at the same time, I haven't seen AWS create a nice api interface for their products. For so many teams, it is still just to complicated to set-up and get going. I had a similar scare yesterday when Google launched Google Earth in the browser with a bunch of technology which, on the surface, competes with my start-up, but digging deeper, there is often still an opportunity, and they've justified your market.
    - Kocrachon 9y ago
      What do you mean? I am not AWS pro but the boto3 API seems to be pretty great for me on almost all of their services.
Walkman 9y ago
I don't know how everybody feels about this but I really like to control my whole environment from the OS to what servers I use, how I secure them, what kernel features do I allow what packages do I install and how I protect my services. If something goes wrong, I fix it. If something goes wrong with CodeStart you wait for Amazon to fixit. I don't like giving up control.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  There really needs to be a tradeoff here. Control is great, but it can't be so black-on-white as to implying that nothing at all would convince you to give up control all the way down to kernel features. Plus, it's a template, not a closed solution - after it runs, you can observe what was created and tweak to your liking. If you do so much configuration as you're implying, you probably have some templates of your own.
- neoh 9y ago
  This doesn't exactly stop you from doing that though. Companies that need to turn over products quickly and efficiently would benefit a lot from this but I wouldn't see myself using it for everything either.
seanjregan 9y ago
Hey Alexa- Can you fix these bugs for me now?
nikolay 9y ago
Again and again, no CloudFormation support! Edit: Looking into the CloudFormation templates created, there are CodeStar resources, so, I assume, the new resource types are just not documented yet. Not that it needs much documentation, but I will try creating a template with those to test if it works. Edit 2: Here are the new resource types: CodeStarProject: Description: Starting project creation Properties: ProjectDescription: AWS CodeStar created project ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' ProjectName: !Ref 'AppName' ProjectTemplateId: arn:aws:codestar:us-east-1::project-template/webapp-nodeweb-lambda StackId: !Ref 'AWS::StackId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::Project Version: 1.0 SeedRepo: DeletionPolicy: Retain DependsOn: [CodeCommitRepo] Description: Adding application source code to the AWS CodeCommit repository for the project Properties: CodeCommitRepositoryURL: !GetAtt [CodeCommitRepo, CloneUrlHttp] DefaultBranchName: master ProjectTemplateId: arn:aws:codestar:us-east-1::project-template/webapp-nodeweb-lambda Type: AWS::CodeStar::SeedRepository SyncInitialResources: DependsOn: [SeedRepo] Description: Adding the AWS CodeCommit repository to your AWS CodeStar project. Properties: ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::SyncResources Version: 1.0 SyncResources: DependsOn: [SeedRepo, CodeBuildProject, ProjectPipeline, SyncInitialResources] Description: Adding all created resources to your AWS CodeStar project Properties: ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::SyncResources Version: 1.0
spullara 9y ago
It doesn't work for me. Their CloudFormation just fails every time I try to deploy one of the template projects. Painful.
- wiredone 9y ago
  Did you take a look at the CloudFormation errors? There's probably a reason why its failing. This happened to me and it was due to me having a CodeCommit repo the same as my project name.
  - spullara 9y ago
    Nothing obvious in the error.
jonahx 9y ago
Could someone in the know explain how this differs from AWS Mobile Hub?
neoh 9y ago
Why wouldn't Amazon use its recently acquired c9.io as the development tool for this? Did they buy it just to drive it into the ground because activity from the staff has dropped quite a lot.
jaypaulynice 9y ago
I like how they make it look so simple, but then you go to do it, you'll keep cursing at this thing...I think debugging problems might be difficult...I wish in something like this they show a real video making this work and how long it really takes...
bootload 9y ago
"AWS CodeStar is a cloud service designed to make it easier to develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS by simplifying the setup of your entire development project." So amazon moved from letting you develop from the cli to a gui-code editor.
tommoor 9y ago
Only AWS would have a screenshot of a permissions error in a new feature launch post :D
obiefernandez 9y ago
JIRA. Ugh.
joshkpeterson 9y ago
Amazon doesn't take visual design seriously, and they need to start. Heroku and Google do, and as a result their platforms are much more usable.
pritambarhate 9y ago
I haven't tried CodeStar yet (planning to do it on this weekend.), but from the description it seems to have many moving parts already. >>each project using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy.<< As a developer I don't need to know all of that. All I need to know is one command to deploy my deployment package for the project. That way I am productive quickly. Then give me the ability to configure the VM/container size and autoscaling. Now that my app is up and running, give me something like Azure WebJobs to run my worker tasks. Amazon needs to have a better PaaS story than what BeanStalk is. BeanStalk is very flexible but in return, it ends up being too complicated to set up. Compared to Heroku and Azure App Service (which I am using in a .Net project and was surprised to find very easy to get started with.), AWS Elastic BeanStalk is very complicated. With Heroku and Azure App Service, the developer friendly PaaS UX is more or less a cracked problem. AWS just needs to copy it well.
cpt_snowcrash 9y ago
I tried deploying a django app on EBS and node app through code star. The whole experience was really simple. It adds a whole new level of abstraction on deploying and maintaining apps on production level. Though similar solutions exist in market such as pythonanywhere and heroku, but all of this from AWS is just simply phenomenal. I 100% agree that code commit is just amazon trying to push through one of its products. But i don't think that really is the intent of codestar. They want to provide one opinionated workflow for your entire development lifecycle, which works incredibly well for teams of all size. And plus I wouldn't really worry about the lock in situation, thats a good problem to have if you reach a stage where you need to think about these issues and given aws's and overall amazon's stance on pricing I personally don't worry about it at all. Had this service been provided by microsoft I wouldnt have gone for it because of their history of over pricing and creating artificial lock ins. I had tried configuring EBS prior with one of my apps, but the quirks of setting it up had always left me quite frustrated. But this is actually a game changer. I am sure aws will add more templates for different stacks and add more options of extensions - right now only extension is jira. Overall I see codestar evolving into the central core of developing, maintaining and deploying web apps for companies of all sizes.
cdnsteve 9y ago
Not using AWS CI, using Circle. Not using their code hosting, use GitHub for code + Wiki. My question is CodeStar only worth using when you need to deploy a basic "template" app out the door? What happens when our requirements mean changing web server config, firewall rules and all the actual things that happen that are customizations? If you start on CodeStar are you "stuck" with it or can you easily get off it but keep the underlying services? I know its just EC2 horsepower under the hood. The last thing I need is a service that isn't customizable, if that's the case maybe I'd be better sticking with straight Elastic Beanstalk?
technologyvault 9y ago
CodeStar is similar to what Nanobox does, except that Nanobox can be used to deploy to any cloud host.
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
Amazon is the leading hosting provider that continuously tries to hide the infrastructure cost to his clients aka developers so they paid more. Be careful of this "things" pricing should be taken seriously when considering AWS.
triggerman722 9y ago
I lost count after 40 steps...explain the "quickly develop" part again?
- wiredone 9y ago
  It only asks you for a project name - where were the other 39 steps you speak of?

572 points by jeffbarr 9y ago

patrickg_zill 9y ago

Basically more lockin to a single cloud provider.

nathan_f77 9y ago
I would say it's the complete opposite of lock-in. If more cloud providers follow suit, then one day you might be able to simply `git push` to a different provider, then wipe away all your old infrastructure. I'm overstating things, but 12 factor apps should be very easy to migrate, excluding things like databases, DNS records, user roles, etc. But I think this might already be true if you're comparing Heroku with AWS.
- problems 9y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the build and deployment steps are being managed via Amazon-specific tools directly, which want you only to use Amazon-specific services, no? That sounds like lock-in to me. It's pretty trivial to do this kind of thing with Jenkins or Gitlab CI and those don't have that issue. And then you can deploy however you want to any provider.
  - matthewaveryusa 9y ago
    build an interface around it and then make one AWS implementation and one jenkins/gitlab ci implementation? You only lock yourself in if you allow yourself to lock yourself in.
  - nathan_f77 9y ago
    Sure, but Heroku also manages all your build and deployment steps. Migrating away from Heroku is as easy as pushing your code somewhere else, then deleting the app on Heroku. Ideally all of these build and deployment steps are automated for you, because let's face it, most web applications and APIs have very, very similar hosting requirements. Maybe I don't really understand the concept of lock-in. I've never felt "locked in" to anything on AWS, unless you're talking about contracts for reserved instances.
    - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
      Lambda is a good example. You can't pick up and move a lambda solution to another provider without significant overhead, the lock in. Architecturely, migrating a lambda to another compute platform shouldn't be too difficult if its structured well and functionally, but it's still work that would need to be done.
  - bentruyman 9y ago
    From what I can tell, this is a web interface wrapper around a suite of Amazon tools – but nothing is forcing you to exclusively use them once you've created your project. > It's pretty trivial to do this kind of thing with Jenkins or Gitlab CI I think you might be trivializing what's being offered here. This is bigger than a CI server.
    - jmagoon 9y ago
      Can you help me understand what is being offered here? Is it basically a wrapper for, in the Rails world, spin up EC2 instance -> install make / git -> clone repo -> bundle install -> install nginx -> configure nginx to whatever app server they have decided you will be using -> set up CI server? I wonder if you can customize how the recipe gets built? It basically just seems like an AWS specific deployment recipe as a service for people who might not be familiar with a tool like Ansible. Is that accurate?
kt9 9y ago
If you're worried about lock-in checkout https://www.distelli.com https://www.distelli.com. Disclaimer: I'm the founder at distelli

startupdiscuss 9y ago

Is this eventually going to compete with Cloud9, Koding, and other cloud IDEs?

puzzle 9y ago
Amazon bought Cloud9 last year...
- startupdiscuss 9y ago
  I did not realize that. Surprised they don't plug that in front of this.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    You can assume it's only a matter of time.
kevindqc 9y ago
I don't think it is a cloud IDE since it asks you to choose between Visual Studio/Eclipse/Command-line to edit code? It seems to just be something that makes it easier to get started with AWS. A bit like how you can choose Azure when creating new projects in Visual Studio, which will take care of Azure-related boilerplate
- startupdiscuss 9y ago
  I think you're right.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

morinted 9y ago

We'll need a new entry added to AWS in Plain English: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english

kmfrk 9y ago
They should just hire someone to explain these things. A video goes a long way.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  A video goes a long way. As long as there is a text with pictures for weird video adverse engineers like me. I actively avoid videos.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    I don't think you're weird. Instructional or informational videos force their pacing on you. Text and images allow you to learn at your own pace, be it faster or slower than a video. Few things are more frustrating than having to skip back 15 seconds multiple times in a video because I didn't quite get something, or trying to hunt around ahead in the timeline because the current stuff being presented is trivial introductory fluff.
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    I am the same. Give me text! I skip around all over the place, and can (occasionally) read (short) paragraphs in a glance. Videos and their enforced pacing :/
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Seems I'm not alone. 25 upvotes at the moment :-| Now I'm not against videos, I just want good text (not just transcripts) to be available for people like me.
scalatohaskell 9y ago
thats great link, thanks

rajathagasthya 9y ago

Does this take away the need for customers to develop their own tooling to interact with various AWS services? It's hard to understand what this is doing.

nathan_f77 9y ago
My understanding is that this is like Heroku, except there's no additional charge, and you have full access to all of the services underneath in case you need to customize something.
aeleos 9y ago
It seems like this is a tool that simplify the process of creating and managing services to help speed up the development process, while still leaving the typical services that AWS provides available.

draw_down 9y ago

Would it be unkind to suggest that they could look into hiring a designer or two?

cwyers 9y ago
"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- draw_down 9y ago
  Ah yes, I do recall reading that. And now they're proudly launching products with shit like this: https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/AWS%20CodeStar-01-CodeStarWorkflow.png https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/AWS%20CodeStar... I get that the graphics aren't the important part, but jeez.
  - nailer 9y ago
    UX is more than graphics. But yes, if AWS had any kind of sense of UX, DigitalOcean wouldn't exist.
    - geoka9 9y ago
      > UX is more than graphics I'd say they are orthogonal. Craigslist's graphics are bad/nonexistent but I like its UX a lot.
  - jeffbarr 9y ago

siliconc0w 9y ago

Nice - though a lot of these Code* products still seem fairly half baked compared to their dedicated competitors. I kinda wish AWS would launch fewer better products than so many mediocre ones.

brilliantcode 9y ago

I think this coupled with their acquisition of c9.io is beginning to look like a real "cloud killer app". My vision for AWS is being able to login to AWS and see c9 with one click deploy and configuration. I'm patiently awaiting for this. It was one thing that really woke me up to Azure with their wizard form directly from Visual Studio. After AWS reinvent 2016, the Azurphoria wore off and I was an AWS fanboy once more. Having the ability to edit/deploy inside my browser would be a huge tide turning moment.

sigden 9y ago

Looks like they're still working out some kinks. Getting a nice 500 error from the management console.

zifnab06 9y ago

So...Spinnaker except with vendor lock in.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

quaunaut 9y ago

From what I'm reading, this sounds quite a bit like Heroku-style functionality for AWS. Git push is your entire process to deploying a new build, without needing to set up a deployment pipeline, while having the usual escape hatches for deployment that the AWS toolchain has. Definitely a cool thing, a good way to have something that's easy to start with, but as you need a more complex infrastructure would let you add it as necessary without incurring the usual "learn everything at once" cost.

mcjiggerlog 9y ago

Looks like they're trying to compete with Heroku. Will be interesting to see how this develops. Doesn't quite look like they've nailed the ease-of-use quite in the way Heroku have yet, however.

nathan_f77 9y ago

This looks amazing. When it matures, this is probably going to kill Heroku. This may also mean that I will never have to touch devops again. I may never have to use Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, and all that other stuff. At least, not for small to medium-sized deployments. It also means that I'll never need to touch Dokku or Flynn. I was about to say that some company just wasted a lot of money on Deis, but then I remembered that it was Microsoft. So maybe that was a good move, although I feel like Azure is the Bing of cloud providers. I'm actually angry that this took so long. This should have been available 5 years ago.

andrewstuart2 9y ago
> I may never have to use Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, and all that other stuff. True, you may never have to as long as you're okay putting 100% of your faith in the benevolence of a single company. Remember, a good portion of AWS services are completely proprietary and serve as a pretty fancy set of golden, jewel-encrusted handcuffs. Fully open source projects like those you mentioned, on the other hand, are positioning developers who know them to treat the cloud providers of today as just another source of CPU cycles, storage, and networking. For the services I run on Kubernetes in AWS, I can lift and shift those in a day if/when the day comes that Amazon is a little less benevolent with their pricing and service levels. If we were asked to do the same with our services built expecting AWS functionality, it would takes months to years. Guaranteed. Yes, there's a trade-off that I don't get 100% managed services and I have to know a little about the workings of the platform, but I would make that same commitment to AWS the second it didn't do everything for me. In my experience, that moment usually occurs somewhere around the 10-minute mark. Amazon is great today, but Bezos won't live forever and who knows what happens when his successor takes over. It could be great, or it could be a mass exodus of people dumping years of investment. Personally, I'd rather hedge my bets and use their low-cost VMs as my source of compute today, but leave myself plenty of dead-simple exit options and sleep a little more easily at night. That's what open source software is all about.
- meddlepal 9y ago
  The problem is, most people won't work for a company long enough to see your hypothetical doomsday scenario (if it even does). The people who will be screwed are not likely the ones making the decisions today.

kotojo 9y ago

Would this make for a good way to get into aws/devops since it narrows the perspective of their services? I have no experience with devops and want to learn to manage my applications directly (mostly use services like now or heroku currently), but looking at learning aws always seemed intimidating with the 600 different services they run.

AlexB138 9y ago
>Would this make for a good way to get into aws/devops since it narrows the perspective of their services? It depends what you mean by that. In a big way, this negates the need for a dedicated Ops engineer for small to medium deployments on AWS. If you're a developer looks to operate your own small application, this is a great entry point.
- eropple 9y ago
  > this negates the need for a dedicated Ops engineer for small to medium deployments on AWS Ops people were already largely negated in small to medium deployments. This doesn't change much about that. Developers who can handle operations tasks are, as always, in huge demand.

old-gregg 9y ago

They keep climbing up the stack. The final step would be to provide ready-to-go outsourced development teams. Maybe they should acquire Gigster to plug the last gap. ;)

angryasian 9y ago

I don't care about lock in, and I just want something secure and easy to deploy an application. Pricing is important, but heroku gets expensive fast, and I'd eventually like something that I can manage myself once released and I can dedicate more time to. I think this looks great.

late2part 9y ago
How long does it take AWS to get expensive compared to Heroku?
- noobiemcfoob 9y ago
  Depends on market factors. Supply and demand and all that. AWS has created a situation where, from the consumer POV, they have infinite supply to meet whatever demand. Or maybe there is just so much slack in a data center system that it feels that way. The real question is what does the cloud platform future look like when that slack goes away, but I think we're pretty far from that reality.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  As a small point of comparison, redis on Heroku is $200/month for a gig of memory. 1.55G (cache.t2.small) on elasticache is $24/month. For redis at least, the difference is an order of magnitude.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    The t2.small will kick you in the pants in two spots, FWIW: compute and bandwidth. The first probably won't matter for a redis cluster, but the second could definitely hurt. Amazon refuses to be pinned down on how small (it's "low to moderate" bandwidth on their instance matrix), but you will feel the pinch with extended usage. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-matrix https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-mat...
    - bpicolo 9y ago

Alir3z4 9y ago

AWS has a lot of resource to build something "easy to work with" like heroku, but it doesn't. Maybe CodeStar is an attempt ? CodeStar is more like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the one that I still don't know how to take it into my toolchain and development flow. Now AWS CodeStar, that requires bunch of clicks, wizards, permissions configuration, choosing a template and then another changes... To get started with they needed to show bunch of screenshots, while something like Heroku would tell how to use the whole thing in 2-3 commands in terminal. That's all. However, I hope something like CodeStar get more polished and mature so I can move have one place to bill and one thing to worry about and not docker, kubernetes, mesos, ansible, ssh into machine, database backups, etc... edit: Just found out for web applications they use Elastic Beanstalk as deploy step.

neom 9y ago

I'm very curious to see how abstract aws is going to end up getting, would they build a browser (call an aws app directly-ish or something..?)? IMO There is a paradigm shift a-brewing and it doesn't look good for most of the clouds/vps providers.

seneca 9y ago

That sound you hear is thousands of Ops Engineers' future prospects falling further and further into question. It's becoming hard for me to justify staying in the 'DevOps' space with amazing solutions like this coming out regularly from AWS. I can hitch myself to the AWS wagon for a while, but eventually, it seems, dedicated operators just won't be needed for most small to medium deployments. It's tough, because I can see that this is genuinely moving the industry forward, but it's also negating the need for skills I've worked for over a decade to build. I guess this is what carriage builders felt like 100 years ago.

paulddraper 9y ago
Eh. The further AWS moves up the stack, the less dominating their products are. EC2? Awesome. S3? Great. ELB? Good. CodeCommit? Eh. I'd be interested to hear about experiences using CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, etc. but I doubt AWS found the One True Workflow.
- taurath 9y ago
  The more tooling you get around the higher level products, the more whole industries you will capture, at least in part. So many startups are just services adding a bit in the middle of AWS and clients, value that is slowly chipped away by Amazon. Instead of the "full team" you now have an automated lightweight SaaS. AWS's strategy is not looking for the one true workflow, its to envelop enough common usecases that it dominates nearly the whole field, giving you as custom a service as you want.
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    Totally agreed. I call it the "Atlassian strategy": be mediocre at enough things that you become enormously successful. It's a long way from a death knell to competitors though.
- Androider 9y ago
  This does seem to be the case. CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy feel like (and most likely were) developed by entirely different teams, and the actual experience of using any of them is not as good as your average 3rd party provider that fully focuses on just one of the pieces. The main thing the AWS equivalents have going for them at this time is the ultra-low pricing (by selling the underlying AWS services, and mostly not charging for the Code* tools).

jorjordandan 9y ago

Amazon's design language is very meh. Even if you aren't in a cubicle, as soon as you are on their website, you feel like you are in a cubicle. With bad lighting. Heroku is way ahead in this regard. (not saying that is the most important consideration)

bogomipz 9y ago
>"Even if you aren't in a cubicle, as soon as you are on their website, you feel like you are in a cubicle. With bad lighting. " This really made me laugh out loud, so thank you. I understand exactly what you mean and I agree. Cheers.
refrigerator 9y ago
You've summed up my thoughts on AWS's design in a way that I never would have been able to - thanks.

smagch 9y ago

Are there any differences between Cloud Deployment Manager which GCP offer? https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/ https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/

GordonS 9y ago

At a glance, this seems very similar to functionality that has existed in Azure for a very long time (templates in multiple languages, automated build and deployment, monitoring). Not sure why Azure gets so little love here on HN! I don't mean to knock it, it's great to see this functionality make it to AWS, I was just wondering if there were any significant differences to Azure's offering?

intrasight 9y ago
I agree on both points. It would be a great contribution of someone could write a technical review which compares and contrasts the two offerings.
kirse 9y ago
Apparently Azure has been sneaking these features in over the past year or so... I do .NET dev on a daily basis on self-hosted infrastructure and was aware of VSTS and such, but after looking at it now I can safely say that back in early 2016, Azure was nothing like what I'm seeing now. Back then the Dashboard was a steaming pile of Javascript and the TFS / VSTS split had just started. The new Portal appears to be much faster and it looks like they have much better docs: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/apps/aspnet/aspnetcore-to-azure https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/apps/aspnet/as... (Thanks for the heads up)

bushin 9y ago

Where have all the devops gone?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lojack 9y ago
DevOps is a set of practices we should all be using, not a job title. Operations Engineer would be a better title, and they aren't ever going anywhere. DevOps Engineer is a job title -- one that I'm not a big fan of.

randomsofr 9y ago

I wish it supported Golang

skybrian 9y ago

As someone who's happy with Google App Engine for simple apps, is this in any way comparable?

morgante 9y ago

I'm excited to see Amazon entering this space since I think far too much time is spent on setting up and managing devops tools, especially for small and medium-sized projects. [0] I've personally wasted lots of time on repetitively setting up CI/CD, autoscaling, and other basic infrastructure for different companies and projects. Anything Amazon can do to reclaim that time (and encourage more people to adopt best practices) is awesome. That being said, after poking around I have a few criticisms: 1. It doesn't seem like the example templates include Docker. At this point, I think Docker should be considered a must-have for any new ops tool. It makes your application much more portable and eases the learning curve for new developers. 2. Getting things set up and working is still too complex. It took me 20 minutes to get my first project working fully (even just using their standard tools). 3. There doesn't seem to be any ability to bring in an existing project. It'd be awesome if I could just provide a GitHub URL and Amazon would automatically set up all the ops tools I need to have a production-ready deployment of that project. I welcome the competition though. Let humans focus on unique work while computers automate things. [0] In fact, I founded my startup on that premise: http://getgandalf.com/ http://getgandalf.com/

kwahyaj 9y ago

So this is pretty much AWS's answer to IBM Bluemix DevOps pipeline https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started

chuparkoff 9y ago

Wow, this does look awesome. Btw, it doesn't look like they’re promoting this in a huge way, but it just showed up in my feed that Atlassian is offering a free new JIRA Software license if you sign up from within CodeStar. I've been using Atlassian stuff since 2007 and I don't think I’ve ever seen them do this before. I don’t think there’s a free version of JIRA? Has anyone ever seen that before? Pretty sweet! https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953 https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953

SanDimasFootbal 9y ago
Alexa, can you fix these $&@#%* bugs for me now?
- chuparkoff 9y ago
  hahaha. iseewhatyoudidthere
obiefernandez 9y ago
In other words, JIRA has gotten so bad they can't even get people to pay for it anymore.

hbcondo714 9y ago

No .NET / C# template (yet) but the author selected to use Visual Studio as the IDE.

bigtones 9y ago
Hopefully .Net / C# is coming soon. I was really excited, but when they announced supported languages/platforms was a little disappointed.
- hbcondo714 9y ago
  > AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2015 Me too. Hopefully support for Visual Studio 2017 will come out soon as the toolkit for it is still in preview[1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-of-the-aws-toolkit-for-visual-studio-2017/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-of-the-aws-to...
nhebb 9y ago
I was surprised by that. Since Microsoft has been pushing Azure hard the last few years, you'd think Amazon would battle back and come out swinging with a C# template.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jrowley 9y ago

I feel for the skyliner folks today, but their product still looks better/more feature filled than aws's native offering. https://www.skyliner.io/ https://www.skyliner.io/

precipice 9y ago
Nice of you to say, thanks. (I work on Skyliner.)
- pedalpete 9y ago
  I hadn't heard of skyliner before. You guys may be a bit scared but at the same time, I haven't seen AWS create a nice api interface for their products. For so many teams, it is still just to complicated to set-up and get going. I had a similar scare yesterday when Google launched Google Earth in the browser with a bunch of technology which, on the surface, competes with my start-up, but digging deeper, there is often still an opportunity, and they've justified your market.
  - Kocrachon 9y ago
    What do you mean? I am not AWS pro but the boto3 API seems to be pretty great for me on almost all of their services.

Walkman 9y ago

I don't know how everybody feels about this but I really like to control my whole environment from the OS to what servers I use, how I secure them, what kernel features do I allow what packages do I install and how I protect my services. If something goes wrong, I fix it. If something goes wrong with CodeStart you wait for Amazon to fixit. I don't like giving up control.

ralmeida 9y ago
There really needs to be a tradeoff here. Control is great, but it can't be so black-on-white as to implying that nothing at all would convince you to give up control all the way down to kernel features. Plus, it's a template, not a closed solution - after it runs, you can observe what was created and tweak to your liking. If you do so much configuration as you're implying, you probably have some templates of your own.
neoh 9y ago
This doesn't exactly stop you from doing that though. Companies that need to turn over products quickly and efficiently would benefit a lot from this but I wouldn't see myself using it for everything either.

seanjregan 9y ago

Hey Alexa- Can you fix these bugs for me now?

nikolay 9y ago

Again and again, no CloudFormation support! Edit: Looking into the CloudFormation templates created, there are CodeStar resources, so, I assume, the new resource types are just not documented yet. Not that it needs much documentation, but I will try creating a template with those to test if it works. Edit 2: Here are the new resource types: CodeStarProject: Description: Starting project creation Properties: ProjectDescription: AWS CodeStar created project ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' ProjectName: !Ref 'AppName' ProjectTemplateId: arn:aws:codestar:us-east-1::project-template/webapp-nodeweb-lambda StackId: !Ref 'AWS::StackId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::Project Version: 1.0 SeedRepo: DeletionPolicy: Retain DependsOn: [CodeCommitRepo] Description: Adding application source code to the AWS CodeCommit repository for the project Properties: CodeCommitRepositoryURL: !GetAtt [CodeCommitRepo, CloneUrlHttp] DefaultBranchName: master ProjectTemplateId: arn:aws:codestar:us-east-1::project-template/webapp-nodeweb-lambda Type: AWS::CodeStar::SeedRepository SyncInitialResources: DependsOn: [SeedRepo] Description: Adding the AWS CodeCommit repository to your AWS CodeStar project. Properties: ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::SyncResources Version: 1.0 SyncResources: DependsOn: [SeedRepo, CodeBuildProject, ProjectPipeline, SyncInitialResources] Description: Adding all created resources to your AWS CodeStar project Properties: ProjectId: !Ref 'ProjectId' Type: AWS::CodeStar::SyncResources Version: 1.0

spullara 9y ago

It doesn't work for me. Their CloudFormation just fails every time I try to deploy one of the template projects. Painful.

wiredone 9y ago
Did you take a look at the CloudFormation errors? There's probably a reason why its failing. This happened to me and it was due to me having a CodeCommit repo the same as my project name.
- spullara 9y ago
  Nothing obvious in the error.

jonahx 9y ago

Could someone in the know explain how this differs from AWS Mobile Hub?

neoh 9y ago

Why wouldn't Amazon use its recently acquired c9.io as the development tool for this? Did they buy it just to drive it into the ground because activity from the staff has dropped quite a lot.

jaypaulynice 9y ago

I like how they make it look so simple, but then you go to do it, you'll keep cursing at this thing...I think debugging problems might be difficult...I wish in something like this they show a real video making this work and how long it really takes...

bootload 9y ago

"AWS CodeStar is a cloud service designed to make it easier to develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS by simplifying the setup of your entire development project." So amazon moved from letting you develop from the cli to a gui-code editor.

tommoor 9y ago

Only AWS would have a screenshot of a permissions error in a new feature launch post :D

obiefernandez 9y ago

JIRA. Ugh.

joshkpeterson 9y ago

Amazon doesn't take visual design seriously, and they need to start. Heroku and Google do, and as a result their platforms are much more usable.

pritambarhate 9y ago

I haven't tried CodeStar yet (planning to do it on this weekend.), but from the description it seems to have many moving parts already. >>each project using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy.<< As a developer I don't need to know all of that. All I need to know is one command to deploy my deployment package for the project. That way I am productive quickly. Then give me the ability to configure the VM/container size and autoscaling. Now that my app is up and running, give me something like Azure WebJobs to run my worker tasks. Amazon needs to have a better PaaS story than what BeanStalk is. BeanStalk is very flexible but in return, it ends up being too complicated to set up. Compared to Heroku and Azure App Service (which I am using in a .Net project and was surprised to find very easy to get started with.), AWS Elastic BeanStalk is very complicated. With Heroku and Azure App Service, the developer friendly PaaS UX is more or less a cracked problem. AWS just needs to copy it well.

cpt_snowcrash 9y ago

I tried deploying a django app on EBS and node app through code star. The whole experience was really simple. It adds a whole new level of abstraction on deploying and maintaining apps on production level. Though similar solutions exist in market such as pythonanywhere and heroku, but all of this from AWS is just simply phenomenal. I 100% agree that code commit is just amazon trying to push through one of its products. But i don't think that really is the intent of codestar. They want to provide one opinionated workflow for your entire development lifecycle, which works incredibly well for teams of all size. And plus I wouldn't really worry about the lock in situation, thats a good problem to have if you reach a stage where you need to think about these issues and given aws's and overall amazon's stance on pricing I personally don't worry about it at all. Had this service been provided by microsoft I wouldnt have gone for it because of their history of over pricing and creating artificial lock ins. I had tried configuring EBS prior with one of my apps, but the quirks of setting it up had always left me quite frustrated. But this is actually a game changer. I am sure aws will add more templates for different stacks and add more options of extensions - right now only extension is jira. Overall I see codestar evolving into the central core of developing, maintaining and deploying web apps for companies of all sizes.

cdnsteve 9y ago

Not using AWS CI, using Circle. Not using their code hosting, use GitHub for code + Wiki. My question is CodeStar only worth using when you need to deploy a basic "template" app out the door? What happens when our requirements mean changing web server config, firewall rules and all the actual things that happen that are customizations? If you start on CodeStar are you "stuck" with it or can you easily get off it but keep the underlying services? I know its just EC2 horsepower under the hood. The last thing I need is a service that isn't customizable, if that's the case maybe I'd be better sticking with straight Elastic Beanstalk?

technologyvault 9y ago

CodeStar is similar to what Nanobox does, except that Nanobox can be used to deploy to any cloud host.

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

Amazon is the leading hosting provider that continuously tries to hide the infrastructure cost to his clients aka developers so they paid more. Be careful of this "things" pricing should be taken seriously when considering AWS.

triggerman722 9y ago

I lost count after 40 steps...explain the "quickly develop" part again?

wiredone 9y ago
It only asks you for a project name - where were the other 39 steps you speak of?