How CodeCatalyst compares to other AWS Services related to Development and CI/CD processes

At re:Invent 2022 AWS announced Amazon CodeCatalyst and as you might have read on my blog or seen on my YouTube Channel I have been playing around with the service a lot.
A few days ago, Brian asked me a few interesting questions, one of them being:

What’s the diff between CodeCatalyst and AppComposer?

Brian Tarbox, AWS Hero

Lately we had a Community Builders session with the Amazon CodeCatalyst team and similar questions came up in regards to comparing CodeCatalyst with other, already existing services.

And to be honest, the amount of AWS services that are related to building, managing or deploying software projects on AWS has grown a lot in the last years and it gets difficult to keep an overview of how these services play together and which tool has which functionality.

In this post we are aiming to compare and place CodeCatalyst in relation to other (new or already existing) AWS Services. We are also going to look at missing functionalities that are currently available in other services but not in CodeCatalyst.

Please be aware that these are all our personal opinions and based on our own understanding – some of it being assumptions.

This post was Co-Authored with AWS Community Hero Brian Tarbox – Thanks for your support!

AWS Services that we are going to compare CodeCatalyst with:

Amplify

Amplify was released at re:Invent 2018 and has since then been improved gradually. 

Amplify is a complete solution that lets frontend web and mobile developers easily build, ship, and host full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as use cases evolve. 

With that AWS positions Amplify as a service that is able to reduce the heavy lifting on web or mobile developers that want to get started on AWS. AWS has extended Amplify into being a service that offers nearly all building blocks required as part of your SDLC process. It does not offer source code repositories, but CI/CD capabilities. You are able to configure the CI/CD pipeline  and also provide your own build images.
With the release of Amplify Studio in 2021 AWS extended the capabilities to include a “No-Code/Low-Code” capability that allows rapid-prototyping for web and mobile applications. The target audience for Amplify are Front-End and Mobile developers with no to minimal experience on AWS.

Application Composer

This is a new AWS service announced at re:Invent 2022 mainly focused on “rapid prototyping” helping you to quickly “paint” serverless applications – build our your architecture out with visualizations, Application Composer will create the required “starting code” (Cloudformation, but also Lambda code) in the background.
As output you get a project in code that you can then commit to a Git repository or deploy out to AWS. Application composer enables Serverless developers to quickly prototype serverless applications and convert them into code that can then be used as a starting point for your project.
Application composer does not provide Source Code management or CI/CD capabilities.

The service, which reached GA on March 8th of 2023, points at developers starting new serverless projects that quickly want to get both an architecture diagram as well as a starting point for further developments.

App Runner

This is a AWS service announced in 2021 and it can be used to build, deploy and run web applications based on containerized workloads. It allows you to stay focused on your application with the service taking responsibility to provision and host your application. It also takes care of creating a container from your source code. You can connect App Runner either to your source code management system or to a container registry.

Beanstalk

This is one of the “ancient” AWS services – it was announced in 2011 and has since then been around. In the community I have more than once heard that “Beanstalk is dead” and not being actively developed anymore, but still – it works and can be used to provision your web applications. At the same time, you will still be able to access the infrastructure that is required to host your service. The “message” is similar to App Runner – it helps developers to focus on writing business code and ignore the deployment strategy. Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go and Docker web applications. In order to use Beanstalk, you will need to upload a source bundle – it is not possible to connect beanstalk automatically to a Git repository, but you can update the source bundle automatically using APIs. 

CodePipeline / CodeCommit / CodeBuild / CodeStar / CodeArtifact

We treat these services in one  group as they belong together from a strategic point of view. They have been around for a few years and the teams that built these are now involved in CodeCatalyst. CodeCatalyst partly uses them “under the hood”. CodeCommit is a managed git hosting, CodeBuild is a managed “build” system, CodeStar is a “project management” tool. CodePipeline allows combining multiple CodeBuild steps to form a pipeline. CDK Pipelines integrate with CodePipeline today. With CodeArtifact users are able to store artifacts and software packages.

All of these services are tied to a specific AWS Account and live within the AWS Console. This has forced organizations and AWS customers to create “toolchain accounts” that centrally host these services.   These tools might be considered as building blocks rather than a full solution.

CodeCatalyst

As we are comparing the other services with CodeCatalyst, we also need to define what CodeCatalyst is: a new AWS service announced at re:Invent 2022 that will cover the full lifecycle of product development on AWS, starting from the source up to the deployment part. It is an “All-in-one” solution to help you build software on AWS efficiently. You can manage your planning and issue tracking in it as well as your source code and your CI/CD workflows. I have a few introduction videos recorded available on YouTube.
CodeCatalyst lives “off” the AWS Console and this means that you do not need to be logged in to use it – and it can access multiple AWS accounts by an integrated authorization process.

Proton

This is a AWS service announced in 2020 – and AWS describes Proton as a service to allow central teams to build and provide central infrastructure components that can easily be shared with users while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the deployed infrastructure. With that, the tool is focused on infrastructure provisioning (=deployment) pipelines. Proton allows the central “platform team” to provide templates to be used by application teams – with only minor changes or configurations to it.

Which problem(s) does CodeCatalyst address?

CodeCatalyst addresses the need of developers or of development teams that need to cover all parts of the product life cycle or parts of it with a tool natively built on AWS. It can be used for issue management and planning as well as source code management. It has natively built CI/CD capabilities with workflows for Continuous Integration and Deployment. CodeCatalyst offers an opinionated solution for addressing software development best practices on AWS.  It also allows online-editing of source code with the Dev Environments and supports the management with reports on resources and workflows managed as part of CodeCatalyst.With Blue Prints it allows developers to quickly start a new project and reduces the time to get a new project started.  It can be seen as an opinionated approach to development.

So, how does CodeCatalyst relate to the other services?

Out of the six services we looked at, a few can at first glance not compete or be compared with CodeCatalyst as they target a different audience or address different problems as CodeCatalyst:

  • Proton – does not help with building or deploying code, it is targeted towards “composing” an application from various pieces.  As such, it might be part of a solution but not the whole solution
  • Application Composer – while this service can be used to do a rapid-prototyping for serverless architectures, it does not allow source code management or deployment of the built architecture. I hope that we will see Application Composer as a new option for starting off a new project in CodeCatalyst going forward
  • Beanstalk – is not a “developer focused” tool as it comes with pre-build environments and CI/CD pipelines and expects you to manage the source code externally

Based on this, the services we want to look at in more details are:

  • Amplify
  • App Runner
  • CodePipeline / CodeCommit / CodeBuild / CodeStar / CodeArtifact

CodeCatalyst vs. Amplify

While Amplify allows to build CI/CD pipelines and manage deployments for both Front-End and Back-End components of an application, the pipelines and deployments are limited to the services supported by Amplify and the capabilities of the automatically generated CI/CD pipeline. There is not much flexibility to adjust the pipelines. In addition to that, Amplify does not allow you to store your source code or to manage your software project. It has no build-in issue management or tracking system. 

With Amplify Studio and the corresponding tutorials you get the possibility to quickly get started on specific use cases. This is not as flexible as the CodeCatalyst Blue Prints but gets you started pretty quickly. Amplify Studio is awesome as a “low-code”, getting you started tool – it allows you to quickly build full-stack applications through a User Interface and for that use case it is definitely better than CodeCatalyst. At the Berlin Summit in 2022 I attended a Live Demo of Rene Brandle and was amazed by the functionalities.

Amplify Studio lives “outside” the AWS Console in the same way as CodeCatalyst and it also requires an AWS account to be connected for deployments. Each Amplify project can be connected to one AWS account. This is more flexible in CodeCatalyst.

Still, Amplify misses a lot of things that are required for an end-to-end “DevOps” tool to manage all processes and requirements of an agile software development project.

 CodeCatalyst vs. CodePipeline / CodeCommit / CodeBuild / CodeStar / CodeArtifact 

Comparing CodeCatalyst to the Code* services (CodePipeline / CodeCommit / CodeBuild / CodeStar / CodeArtifact) feels a bit like comparing a Tesla Model 3 with Karl Benz’ Patent-Motorwagen 🙂

The Code* services feel complex to use, although they provide similar functionality than CodeCatalyst if you combine them together. They are “building blocks” that you as a developer can use to build “your own version” of an integrated Developer Toolchain.

In addition to that they live in a specific AWS account, as mentioned above, which makes the handling of access complicated and requires you to have an IAM user that is allowed to access them.

The user interface and possible integrations are minimal and feel “developer unfriendly”.
CodeCommit has the CodeGuru Reviewer integration which is currently not available in CodeCatalyst.

CodeBuild (and with that CodePipeline) is very slow in bringing up new, fresh “build instances” – so starting a new pipeline execution can take minutes which is bad for developer productivity. This is something that CodeCatalyst is addressing with the “lambda” execution environment.

Summary, takeaways and our wishes

As per the messaging, blog posts and announcements from AWS around CodeCatalyst, we believe that the service today aims to offer an opinionated tool for development teams that want to practice “You build it, you run it” – in line with the DevOps mentality. It also means that AWS shows the courage to not only give builders a tool at hand but also “influences” what they build with Blue Prints that include best practices. The vision for CodeCatalyst however could be even more than that: a tool, powered by KI capabilities that empowers builders to efficiently develop and build high quality software by reducing the manual work and efforts through automation.

However, CodeCatalyst is not yet there and it’s going to take some time and effort from the team to reach this.

Wishes for Developer Tooling in General

This post has shown that AWS offers a lot of different possibilities to handle software projects on AWS. We made clear that all of the available tools serve a different purpose and target a different audience. While Amplify focusses on Web or Mobile developer and Application Composer targets Serverless developers, Code Catalyst takes a more generalist approach.

Overall, the “Developer Tools” landscape on AWS needs:

  • More and better guidance on WHEN to use WHICH service
  • Better “HOW TOS” instead of hard-to-read documentation or specification

Wishes for CodeCatalyst

Compiling a wish-list for CodeCatalyst can be a big effort as there are still a lot of features that we would like to see. We’ll touch on a few ones here:

  1. General
    • Single Sign On without Builder ID – Okta/Ping/etc.
    • Other regions support
    • Allow “Open Source” projects
  2. Issues / Tracking
    • Epics
    • Roadmap / Timeline
    • Integration with Workflows & Automation
  3. Source
    • Import projects from Git providers
    • Automations on Pull Request
    • CodeGuru
    • Security Review
    • Best Practice Review
    • Support of pre-commit hooks when editing online
    • Verifications, linting, etc. automated
  4. Workflows
    • More triggers (e.g. by PR, by schedule, by API)
    • Conditional Steps
    • Manual approvals
    • App Store / Play Store deploy actions
    • Projen Action
    • Better integration with AWS services
    • Import existing CodePipelines
      • Pipeline as Code – CDKPipelines like option to create workflows from code

    What wishes do YOU have for Code Catalyst? What is your “most hated” or “most loved” feature today?

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