8 ms·

AWS CodePipeline

217 points by jeffbarr 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dynjo 11y ago
Amazon seriously need to hire some good UI designers. They produce great stuff but it all looks like it was designed by developers in 1980.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  Yeah, the console feels cobbled together with whatever a particular team decided they'd use for their small part.
- softawre 11y ago
  It just needs to be usable, which it is in my experience. Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT.
  - andybak 11y ago
    The initial impression of a new AWS console is pretty overwhelming. I've stuck with DigitalOcean and CloudFlare over Amazon alternatives partly because every time I sign into AWS all I can think is "Heck. Which of these product names and acronyms matches the thing I came here to do?"
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      I will fully admit that when I started using AWS, it took me a while to learn Amazon's "language." Unfortunately Amazon does a bad job of distinguishing between their core offerings (e.g. S3, EC2, Route53, etc) and their very niche ones (e.g. EMR, Kinesis, SWF, etc), so new users are left scrambling to figure out what they need to know. I understand their desire to create unique "products" that people can use in a conversation (e.g. "Have you considered Route53 for your DNS?"), but ultimately mixing common and niche things together and giving everything confusing names is likely doing Amazon more harm than good. That all being said, Amazon are slowly improving. See this page[0]. They now have a list of their products and how they fit into different categories. But the console can still be a jumbled mess of different acronyms and made up words. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/
      - rjbwork 11y ago
        This is why I REALLY like the MS/Azure way of doing things. "I need to host a web app" "Okay there's Azure Web Apps for that" "I need to store lots of files" "There's Azure Storage/Blob Storage for that" "I need a SQL Database" "There's Azure SQL for that" "I need a VM" "There's Azure Virtual Machines for that" "I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that" "I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that" "I need a Data Warehouse" "There's Azure Data Warehouse for that" "I need a Cache" "There's Azure Redis Cache for that" I could go on, but you get the picture. Cute names are not the way to go when you're offering dozens of services which may overlap with eachother somewhat. I can just scroll down a list of things MS offers on Azure and be able to easily pick out the things I need to use by their names alone.
        Artemis2 11y ago
        As someone who does not uses Azure, what is a Data Lake? Is it like a Cloud but liquid?
        redwards510 11y ago
        "A massive, easily accessible data repository built on (relatively) inexpensive computer hardware for storing "big data". Unlike data marts, which are optimized for data analysis by storing only some attributes and dropping data below the level aggregation, a data lake is designed to retain all attributes, especially so when you do not yet know what the scope of data or its use will be."
        Artemis2 11y ago
        > data marts So it's just deeper down the rabbit hole.
        rjbwork 11y ago
        The intended use is to be able to use things like Hadoop or other tabular text processing systems to glean information from enormous amounts of data, then once valuable insights are found, use the Data Lake source to process it into a form suitable for a data mart, or preferably, a data warehouse.
  - aikah 11y ago
    Do you really find the AWS console usable? I was shocked the first time I logged into that thing, I said to myself, "what the hell is that?". AWS is certainly one of the most complicated app available online, and i'm sure it is maintained by a lot of different teams but a serious designer didn't do the UX/UI. It feels SO clunky. > Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT. the problem is I think it's much more difficult to iterate with this kind of abstractions.
- mcintyre1994 11y ago
  I find this comment interesting because I thought it was Bootstrap - I think a few versions/years old but not any older than Bootstrap.
- robotnoises 11y ago
  I agree it doesn't look great, but I assure you they have A/B tested the shit out of every page they have ever rendered. Aesthetics aside, I am sure there is a justifible reason they do everything in their UIs.
  - whafro 11y ago
    Eh, I'd agree about pages on the public/commerce side, but I highly doubt anything approaching that same level of rigor applies to the AWS console.
    - robotnoises 11y ago
      That's a very good point. Maybe a more accurate statement is "any page that could potentially drive a sale has been A/B tested to death."
- jon-wood 11y ago
  I don't think anyone on the AWS team really thinks of the console as being the primary UI for AWS. The primary UIs are the API and CLI interfaces.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    > The primary UIs are the API and CLI interfaces. This used to be the case - new features usually launched API-only and console came later - but I think Amazon has woken up to the fact that many customers want to play with it easily before they go automating everything using the API.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- solve 11y ago
  Strongly disagree. Beautiful design is a failure anti-pattern. It's no coincidence that many of the best tools are ugly. AWS is a set of tools.
  - bgibson 11y ago
    > Beautiful design is a failure anti-pattern. I've been wondering about this recently myself. It does seem to be the case sometimes. Any idea why, or if this has ever been studied?
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      Pretty app - Ehh, I could add this new feature but it would make my menu go off screen, maybe I will skip it and work on making the profile icon sparkle. Function ugly app - Ehhh I could research better fonts, but sans serif will work - let's go code some new featues.
- uberdog 11y ago
  Have you used Asgard? The AWS console is gorgeous comparatively.
  - softawre 11y ago
    Haha. Which is funny, considering Netflix has some pretty good UX all around. That's what happens when developers builds UIs.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Netflix has long had bits of horrid UX. They just finally replaced the agggggggonizingly slow scroll left/right as you're browsing through the suggested content carousels. An internal tool like Asgard doesn't have the same need a customer-facing tool like the AWS Console does to be user-friendly, either.
- twistedpair 11y ago
  AWS sells an API. Serious users don't use the web console. Need to tend your cluster of 1000+ EC2 servers? The Web console will fail for that. The console fronts the API, just like the CLI tool. AWS just builds the basic UI's to make it possible for people to do simple things. If you get deep into the weeds, you'll need to use the API directly, i.e. for installing an SSL cert on your CloudFront distribution, or launching a 2K node computing cluster. If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. That has become a viable business model for various startups, or launch your own hosting company on top of EC2 like Heroku.
  - dchest 11y ago
    If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. Or ask Amazon to hire some good UI designers.
    - twistedpair 11y ago
      Why? I'm amazed people expect a light and airy, responsive, material designed enterprise control panel that is redesigned yearly. These are backend tools. The UI works and was (1) not meant to be sexy and (2) not meant to push sales. AWS is in a race to the bottom, cutting prices all the time. Hiring 50 UX devs to rewrite their web interfaces doesn't comport with Jeff's lean vision.
      - brianwawok 11y ago
        You can both be pretty AND powerful. It is hard to do, but it can happen.
      - dchest 11y ago
        Looks like you are confusing UI designers with bullshit designers, who make such things "material design". It's not a beauty contest.
pragar 11y ago
Thanks. I was eagerly waiting for this :)
jtwaleson 11y ago
Is there any way to integrate this with ECS? That would be a great feature for me.
ebbv 11y ago
What's up with the Amazons spam? There's 5 different submissions on the front page right now. They could have all been one. Bad form, AWS team.
- andyjohnson0 11y ago
  AWS Global Summit [1] is taking place in NY at the moment. Hence the new product announcements. [1] https://live.awsevents.com/ https://live.awsevents.com/
  - ebbv 11y ago
    That is not addressing my question; why are they posted as 5 separate submissions instead of being 1 LiveBlog post or something?
    - andyjohnson0 11y ago
      Because they were posted by different people who didn't take your preference for a single post into account.
      - ebbv 11y ago
        At least two of them are posted by the same guy. And at least some, if not all of them, are being posted by Amazon employees. So again, I say, the AWS team is spamming HN and it's in poor form. It should all be one submission.
        kordless 11y ago
        Note that you are also getting voted down. Lot's of Amazon employees to hit down votes on people who say anything against them. This text may be grey. :)
        WaltPurvis 11y ago
        He's getting voted down because he's completely wrong and semi-slandering Amazon employees with no factual basis, as are you.
jayonsoftware 11y ago
Can we build .NET code ?
- cschneid 11y ago
  From my reading, it appears to hook up to a Jenkins server, potentially that you control, so it can do anything Jenkins can, which includes building windows artifacts.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
darksaints 11y ago
Internally at Amazon, Pipelines (which inspired this service) was a lifesaver. Apollo (which is the inspiration for CodeDeploy) was also helpful, but should probably just be replaced by Docker or OSv at this point. But if they ever release a tool that is inspired by the Brazil build system, pack up and run for the hills. When it takes a team of devs over two years to get Python to build and run on your servers, you know your frankenstein build system is broken. It could be replaced by shell scripts and still be orders of magnitude better. Nobody deserves the horror of working with that barf sandwich.
- mirceal 11y ago
  hah. I believe you either don't understand Brazil (the build system) or you had to deal with inexperienced people that don't get it. IMHO the internal Amazon tooling is THE reason Amazon is able to build things so fast and to iterate so quickly.
  - SpikeGronim 11y ago
    I love Brazil and Apollo. As an ex-Amazonian I miss them on a weekly basis.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - saosebastiao 11y ago
      If you are on a team that does nothing but Java on a MAWS or corp platform, brazil was built for you and I wouldn't be surprised that you like it. But...if you deviate slightly, you run the chance of not getting what you need. If you stray away from the JVM or Ruby, chances are you will never get anything at all, let alone what you need.
      - mirceal 11y ago
        ruby, java, perl :S , python, roll-your-own have done it all. :) yes, the learning curve can be pretty steep, but one thing that always helps is that the probability that there is somebody out there that did it already is very high. you just need to be curios and invest into learning it and looking at what others are doing.
atmosx 11y ago
This is interesting for lone developers, but I'm not sure about the pricing: You’ll pay $1 per active pipeline per month (the first one is available to you at no charge as part of the AWS Free Tier). An active pipeline has at least one code change move through it during the course of a month. Does this mean that every time you run a session you pay 1 EUR no matter how many stages the session has (pull, compile/build, test (multiple tests) and deploy?
- BillinghamJ 11y ago
  No, you pay $1/month/pipeline for the pipelines which you've used during the month. Pipeline used 0 times - $0, 1 time - $1, 500 times - $1
  - mirceal 11y ago
    10000 times - $1 :) this is not to make money. It's to drive adoption of AWS and get [even] more people on it by making their lives easier.
felipesabino 11y ago
I wonder why GitHub specifically and not just Git repos in general? Isn't it weird? It means they don't even support their own new "Git" product AWS CodeCommit [1] [1]https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-aws-codecommit/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-aws-codecommi...
- andrewguenther 11y ago
  My guess would be WebHooks support.
  - felipesabino 11y ago
    That could be, just noticed that CodePipeline's Post-Receive Hooks are still a work in progress
    - shekhargulati 11y ago
      Yes, you have to poll CodePipeline every second or so to get the jobs and perform your task. Currently, web hooks are not implemented or they are WIP.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
maikklein 11y ago
Could I install Unreal Engine 4 on CodePipleline so that I can build my game remotely?
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  As far as I can tell this is more about orchestrating builds, to actually build your game you'd need to run jenkins on an EC2 instance and connect it to CodePipeline.

217 points by jeffbarr 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dynjo 11y ago

Amazon seriously need to hire some good UI designers. They produce great stuff but it all looks like it was designed by developers in 1980.

ceejayoz 11y ago
Yeah, the console feels cobbled together with whatever a particular team decided they'd use for their small part.
softawre 11y ago
It just needs to be usable, which it is in my experience. Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT.
- andybak 11y ago
  The initial impression of a new AWS console is pretty overwhelming. I've stuck with DigitalOcean and CloudFlare over Amazon alternatives partly because every time I sign into AWS all I can think is "Heck. Which of these product names and acronyms matches the thing I came here to do?"
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    I will fully admit that when I started using AWS, it took me a while to learn Amazon's "language." Unfortunately Amazon does a bad job of distinguishing between their core offerings (e.g. S3, EC2, Route53, etc) and their very niche ones (e.g. EMR, Kinesis, SWF, etc), so new users are left scrambling to figure out what they need to know. I understand their desire to create unique "products" that people can use in a conversation (e.g. "Have you considered Route53 for your DNS?"), but ultimately mixing common and niche things together and giving everything confusing names is likely doing Amazon more harm than good. That all being said, Amazon are slowly improving. See this page[0]. They now have a list of their products and how they fit into different categories. But the console can still be a jumbled mess of different acronyms and made up words. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/
    - rjbwork 11y ago
      This is why I REALLY like the MS/Azure way of doing things. "I need to host a web app" "Okay there's Azure Web Apps for that" "I need to store lots of files" "There's Azure Storage/Blob Storage for that" "I need a SQL Database" "There's Azure SQL for that" "I need a VM" "There's Azure Virtual Machines for that" "I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that" "I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that" "I need a Data Warehouse" "There's Azure Data Warehouse for that" "I need a Cache" "There's Azure Redis Cache for that" I could go on, but you get the picture. Cute names are not the way to go when you're offering dozens of services which may overlap with eachother somewhat. I can just scroll down a list of things MS offers on Azure and be able to easily pick out the things I need to use by their names alone.
      - Artemis2 11y ago
        As someone who does not uses Azure, what is a Data Lake? Is it like a Cloud but liquid?
        redwards510 11y ago
        "A massive, easily accessible data repository built on (relatively) inexpensive computer hardware for storing "big data". Unlike data marts, which are optimized for data analysis by storing only some attributes and dropping data below the level aggregation, a data lake is designed to retain all attributes, especially so when you do not yet know what the scope of data or its use will be."
        Artemis2 11y ago
        > data marts So it's just deeper down the rabbit hole.
        rjbwork 11y ago
        The intended use is to be able to use things like Hadoop or other tabular text processing systems to glean information from enormous amounts of data, then once valuable insights are found, use the Data Lake source to process it into a form suitable for a data mart, or preferably, a data warehouse.
- aikah 11y ago
  Do you really find the AWS console usable? I was shocked the first time I logged into that thing, I said to myself, "what the hell is that?". AWS is certainly one of the most complicated app available online, and i'm sure it is maintained by a lot of different teams but a serious designer didn't do the UX/UI. It feels SO clunky. > Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT. the problem is I think it's much more difficult to iterate with this kind of abstractions.
mcintyre1994 11y ago
I find this comment interesting because I thought it was Bootstrap - I think a few versions/years old but not any older than Bootstrap.
robotnoises 11y ago
I agree it doesn't look great, but I assure you they have A/B tested the shit out of every page they have ever rendered. Aesthetics aside, I am sure there is a justifible reason they do everything in their UIs.
- whafro 11y ago
  Eh, I'd agree about pages on the public/commerce side, but I highly doubt anything approaching that same level of rigor applies to the AWS console.
  - robotnoises 11y ago
    That's a very good point. Maybe a more accurate statement is "any page that could potentially drive a sale has been A/B tested to death."
jon-wood 11y ago
I don't think anyone on the AWS team really thinks of the console as being the primary UI for AWS. The primary UIs are the API and CLI interfaces.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  > The primary UIs are the API and CLI interfaces. This used to be the case - new features usually launched API-only and console came later - but I think Amazon has woken up to the fact that many customers want to play with it easily before they go automating everything using the API.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
solve 11y ago
Strongly disagree. Beautiful design is a failure anti-pattern. It's no coincidence that many of the best tools are ugly. AWS is a set of tools.
- bgibson 11y ago
  > Beautiful design is a failure anti-pattern. I've been wondering about this recently myself. It does seem to be the case sometimes. Any idea why, or if this has ever been studied?
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    Pretty app - Ehh, I could add this new feature but it would make my menu go off screen, maybe I will skip it and work on making the profile icon sparkle. Function ugly app - Ehhh I could research better fonts, but sans serif will work - let's go code some new featues.
uberdog 11y ago
Have you used Asgard? The AWS console is gorgeous comparatively.
- softawre 11y ago
  Haha. Which is funny, considering Netflix has some pretty good UX all around. That's what happens when developers builds UIs.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Netflix has long had bits of horrid UX. They just finally replaced the agggggggonizingly slow scroll left/right as you're browsing through the suggested content carousels. An internal tool like Asgard doesn't have the same need a customer-facing tool like the AWS Console does to be user-friendly, either.
twistedpair 11y ago
AWS sells an API. Serious users don't use the web console. Need to tend your cluster of 1000+ EC2 servers? The Web console will fail for that. The console fronts the API, just like the CLI tool. AWS just builds the basic UI's to make it possible for people to do simple things. If you get deep into the weeds, you'll need to use the API directly, i.e. for installing an SSL cert on your CloudFront distribution, or launching a 2K node computing cluster. If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. That has become a viable business model for various startups, or launch your own hosting company on top of EC2 like Heroku.
- dchest 11y ago
  If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. Or ask Amazon to hire some good UI designers.
  - twistedpair 11y ago
    Why? I'm amazed people expect a light and airy, responsive, material designed enterprise control panel that is redesigned yearly. These are backend tools. The UI works and was (1) not meant to be sexy and (2) not meant to push sales. AWS is in a race to the bottom, cutting prices all the time. Hiring 50 UX devs to rewrite their web interfaces doesn't comport with Jeff's lean vision.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      You can both be pretty AND powerful. It is hard to do, but it can happen.
    - dchest 11y ago
      Looks like you are confusing UI designers with bullshit designers, who make such things "material design". It's not a beauty contest.

pragar 11y ago

Thanks. I was eagerly waiting for this :)

jtwaleson 11y ago

Is there any way to integrate this with ECS? That would be a great feature for me.

ebbv 11y ago

What's up with the Amazons spam? There's 5 different submissions on the front page right now. They could have all been one. Bad form, AWS team.

andyjohnson0 11y ago
AWS Global Summit [1] is taking place in NY at the moment. Hence the new product announcements. [1] https://live.awsevents.com/ https://live.awsevents.com/
- ebbv 11y ago
  That is not addressing my question; why are they posted as 5 separate submissions instead of being 1 LiveBlog post or something?
  - andyjohnson0 11y ago
    Because they were posted by different people who didn't take your preference for a single post into account.
    - ebbv 11y ago
      At least two of them are posted by the same guy. And at least some, if not all of them, are being posted by Amazon employees. So again, I say, the AWS team is spamming HN and it's in poor form. It should all be one submission.
      - kordless 11y ago
        Note that you are also getting voted down. Lot's of Amazon employees to hit down votes on people who say anything against them. This text may be grey. :)
        WaltPurvis 11y ago
        He's getting voted down because he's completely wrong and semi-slandering Amazon employees with no factual basis, as are you.

jayonsoftware 11y ago

Can we build .NET code ?

cschneid 11y ago
From my reading, it appears to hook up to a Jenkins server, potentially that you control, so it can do anything Jenkins can, which includes building windows artifacts.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

darksaints 11y ago

Internally at Amazon, Pipelines (which inspired this service) was a lifesaver. Apollo (which is the inspiration for CodeDeploy) was also helpful, but should probably just be replaced by Docker or OSv at this point. But if they ever release a tool that is inspired by the Brazil build system, pack up and run for the hills. When it takes a team of devs over two years to get Python to build and run on your servers, you know your frankenstein build system is broken. It could be replaced by shell scripts and still be orders of magnitude better. Nobody deserves the horror of working with that barf sandwich.

mirceal 11y ago
hah. I believe you either don't understand Brazil (the build system) or you had to deal with inexperienced people that don't get it. IMHO the internal Amazon tooling is THE reason Amazon is able to build things so fast and to iterate so quickly.
- SpikeGronim 11y ago
  I love Brazil and Apollo. As an ex-Amazonian I miss them on a weekly basis.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - saosebastiao 11y ago
    If you are on a team that does nothing but Java on a MAWS or corp platform, brazil was built for you and I wouldn't be surprised that you like it. But...if you deviate slightly, you run the chance of not getting what you need. If you stray away from the JVM or Ruby, chances are you will never get anything at all, let alone what you need.
    - mirceal 11y ago
      ruby, java, perl :S , python, roll-your-own have done it all. :) yes, the learning curve can be pretty steep, but one thing that always helps is that the probability that there is somebody out there that did it already is very high. you just need to be curios and invest into learning it and looking at what others are doing.

atmosx 11y ago

This is interesting for lone developers, but I'm not sure about the pricing: You’ll pay $1 per active pipeline per month (the first one is available to you at no charge as part of the AWS Free Tier). An active pipeline has at least one code change move through it during the course of a month. Does this mean that every time you run a session you pay 1 EUR no matter how many stages the session has (pull, compile/build, test (multiple tests) and deploy?

BillinghamJ 11y ago
No, you pay $1/month/pipeline for the pipelines which you've used during the month. Pipeline used 0 times - $0, 1 time - $1, 500 times - $1
- mirceal 11y ago
  10000 times - $1 :) this is not to make money. It's to drive adoption of AWS and get [even] more people on it by making their lives easier.

felipesabino 11y ago

I wonder why GitHub specifically and not just Git repos in general? Isn't it weird? It means they don't even support their own new "Git" product AWS CodeCommit [1] [1]https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-aws-codecommit/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-aws-codecommi...

andrewguenther 11y ago
My guess would be WebHooks support.
- felipesabino 11y ago
  That could be, just noticed that CodePipeline's Post-Receive Hooks are still a work in progress
  - shekhargulati 11y ago
    Yes, you have to poll CodePipeline every second or so to get the jobs and perform your task. Currently, web hooks are not implemented or they are WIP.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

maikklein 11y ago

Could I install Unreal Engine 4 on CodePipleline so that I can build my game remotely?

jordanthoms 11y ago
As far as I can tell this is more about orchestrating builds, to actually build your game you'd need to run jenkins on an EC2 instance and connect it to CodePipeline.