AWS CodeStar — this is how the cloud computing will work in the future

AWS CodeStar service ??

AWS launched two new important services:

• * AWS CodeStar
• * AWS Cloud9 IDE

After AWS Re:Invent, I spent some time setting up AWS Cloud9 service. I was a user of Cloud9 before Amazon acquired them. I really like the IDE and I was wondering how it integrates with the rest of the AWS services.

Then I did some more learning and setup and here are the results:

You can use AWS CodeStar service as an orchestrator/workflow that allows you to:

(1) Code an application (different templates with different languages) using AWS Cloud9.

(2) Manage the source code via AWS CodeCommit.

(3) Deploy it using AWS CodeDeploy.

All of this is managed through the AWS CodeStar dashboard. As part of creating a project within AWS CodeStar, I had an option to set it up with just one EC2 or with Elastic Beanstalk. For simplicity I chose the EC2 flavor and successfully deployed the “Hello World” Python Flask application using AWS CodeStar. After I deployed the initial version of this Python application, I went back into the Cloud9 IDE and changed some code. After doing the “git push” to the master branch, I went back to the AWS CodeStar dashboard and I was able to see in the flow that CodeCommit and CodeDeploy steps automatically started and the code changes were deployed within short time. The URL of the Python web API was provided in the AWS CodeStar dashboard and after browsing to it, or after trying it in Postman, I was able to see my changes.

Try it out because this is how the cloud computing should work; we need to focus on the business logic of our applications and the cloud providers need to take care of the rest. Obviously the AWS CodeStar is the beginning because it is focusing on setting up web applications but the setup of other peripheral services is still not included. For example, if I wanted to set up some SNS topics and SQS queues, I am not sure if the CodeStar would manage that for me.

I am looking forward to future AWS CodeStar enhancements.

Thank you for reading.

Almir Mustafic