That sound you hear is thousands of Ops Engineers' future prospects falling further and further into question.<p>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.
We'll need a new entry added to AWS in Plain English: <a href="https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english" rel="nofollow">https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english</a>
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)
This looks amazing. When it matures, this is probably going to kill Heroku.<p>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.<p>I'm actually angry that this took so long. This should have been available 5 years ago.
I feel for the skyliner folks today, but their product still looks better/more feature filled than aws's native offering.<p><a href="https://www.skyliner.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.skyliner.io/</a>
AWS has a lot of resource to build something "easy to work with" like heroku, but it doesn't. Maybe CodeStar is an attempt ?<p>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.<p>Now AWS CodeStar, that requires bunch of clicks, wizards, permissions configuration, choosing a template and then another changes...<p>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.<p>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...<p>edit: Just found out for web applications they use Elastic Beanstalk as deploy step.
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.<p>I think this looks great.
Again and again, no CloudFormation support!<p>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.<p>Edit 2: Here are the new resource types:<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
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!<p>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?
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.<p>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.
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! <a href="https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JIRA/status/854805603738365953</a>
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. ;)
So this is pretty much AWS's answer to IBM Bluemix DevOps pipeline <a href="https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started" rel="nofollow">https://console.ng.bluemix.net/devops/getting-started</a>
Not using AWS CI, using Circle.<p>Not using their code hosting, use GitHub for code + Wiki.<p>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?
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 <i>more</i> people to adopt best practices) is awesome.<p>That being said, after poking around I have a few criticisms:<p>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.<p>2. Getting things set up and working is <i>still</i> too complex. It took me 20 minutes to get my first project working fully (even just using their standard tools).<p>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.<p>I welcome the competition though. Let humans focus on unique work while computers automate things.<p>[0] In fact, I founded my startup on that premise: <a href="http://getgandalf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getgandalf.com/</a>
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.<p>>>each project using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy.<<<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Are there any differences between Cloud Deployment Manager which GCP offer? <a href="https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would this make for a good way to get into aws/devops since it narrows the perspective of their services?<p>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.
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.
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...
<i>"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."</i><p>So amazon moved from letting you develop from the cli to a gui-code editor.
Looks like they're trying to compete with Heroku. Will be interesting to see how this develops.<p>Doesn't quite look like they've nailed the ease-of-use quite in the way Heroku have yet, however.
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.
I think this coupled with their acquisition of c9.io is beginning to look like a real "cloud killer app".<p>My vision for AWS is being able to login to AWS and see c9 with one click deploy and configuration.<p>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.