During our tour of AWS services, we have touched on several developer tools. We still have several to go, but the recently announced CodeStar is a better way to dive into these services.
CodeStar is an Entire Environment
The CodeStar service is a wrapper of sorts. It guides you through some steps to select the type of development desired and then it builds out an environment. However, this process does not just build out a development environment. It builds out the tools needed for everything involved in the process. This includes version control, build management, a project wiki, links to Jira for task tracking and more. This service provides you an enterprise development environment quickly and easily.
Skip the Details
One of the great strengths of AWS is the ability to select your services a la carte. This approach can also be a frustration. It can take hours to get all of the pieces configured in AWS for a new environment or project. While you have lots of control, there is also a lot of configuration required to exercise that power. CodeStar provides a sort of “wizard” approach to building out an environment and all of the related tools without that upfront configuration cost.
Maintain Control
There are many tools out there to manage your environment. Unfortunately, most of them require control to be given up. The abstraction of the services that makes the tool so useful also hides the ability to configure those pieces in detail. CodeStar does not do that. All of the services it creates are done so within the standard AWS environment. Thus, each piece can be highly configured as needed. The benefit of a quick start is not diminished by a lack of control over the system. It provides the best of both worlds.
Option Rich
CodeStar provides more than one or two choices. It offers multiple approaches to development in Ruby, PHP, Javascript, HTML 5, Java, and more. They have taken the idea of droplets used by some other cloud providers and put it on top of the AWS group of services. If you are considering moving to the Cloud for your development, then Amazon has provided another good reason to consider them for all of your needs. Check it out for yourself and keep an eye out here as we will be going into more depth with CodeStar in future posts.
