This article starts at the very beginning of my own and personal story to the cloud and to where I am today in my career: Back in 2015, when I barely knew that something big as “AWS” existed.
Of course, being a tech nerd since I started my career, I knew what “AWS” was and that I also had glimpse at guessing its tremendous power and opportunities, but I was not aware of the details and of the possibilities I would see.
How we started
At that time me and my team had built out a lift and shift solution on EC2 instances, where our product was manually deployed on. We aimed to grow our business, but we knew that this would not be possible without automation. Our product had different automation requirements and we did automate these running the required jobs through the Windows task manager.
Now, as we decided to be able to offer our service to other and accitional customers, we needed to find additional possibilities for automation and better operational support.
The first thing that we did was to move away from manually provisioning EC2 instances towards using Cloudformation for bringing up the instances and all of the required infratructure (VPC, sub-nets, load balancers, etc.). This already helped us a lot towards being able to deliver our solution faster. But we still had these Windows tasks which needed to be set up on the different instances. And this is where we looked at additional services in AWS to be able to replace these windows tasks with other possibilities.
Adding Serverless capabilities to the mix
At that time, we looked at using AWS Lambda and Stepfunctions – where were a “brand new thing” at that time – to be able to automate and orchestrate our workflows. With StepFunctions being really new, we recorded a “This is my architecture” video at re:Invent 2018. To be honest, when we started to look at Lambda and StepFunctions, I personally was not very convinced. Coming from a Windows / Java background, moving orchestration capabilities “outside” the “server” (=EC2 instance) feeld wrong as I had not thought about orchestrated workfloads which could run across multiple infrastructure components before.
Through StepFunctions, we orchestrated retrieving data, starting a new EC2 instance, automatically installing our software on it and then running the required workfload. AWS Lambda helped us in this case to be able to start EC2 instances programatically. At the same time StepFunctions gave us the possibility to get an overview on the current status of the executions through the AWS Console. The integration with CloudWatch, which was already available at that time, allowed us to implement alarms and enabled monitoring of execution time.
During the process of testing and implementing this orchestration, we regularly hit new obstacles – e.g. a specific instance type not being available in an availability zone or a different error while reading data from S3. We often thought about giving up our approach, but moved on after seing the benefits of automation and being less dependend on a specific EC2 instance.
Orchestrating workflows using AWS StepFunctions is way easier today than at the time that I was part of this project. In 2017, there were only minimal possibilities of direct integrations with other AWS Services from AWS StepFunctions (like Lambda). Today, AWS StepFunctions offers more than 200 service integrations, “normal” workflows (which are quite expensive) and “express” workflows.
I have been using StepFunctions in different projects lately, also in my project around building my own online & mobile game using serverless technologies at pegasus-galaxy.net.
How do you orchestrate your serverless workflows?
What are your experiences with AWS Step Functions?
As Amazon CodeCatalyst is still in Preview, it has only limited integration possibilities with other AWS services or external tools. Sending notifications from a Workflow execution is something that I believe is critical for a CI/CD system – and as I focus on CI/CD at the moment I’ll focus on the notifications on Workflows in this article.
What kind of notifications do I need or expect?
As a user of a CI/CD and Workflow tool there are different levels of notifications that I would like to receive:
Start / End and Status of Workflow execution
State / Stage transitions (for longer running workflows)
Approvals (if required)
In addition to that, based on the context of the notification I would like to get context-specific information:
a) For the “Start” event I would like to know who or which trigger started the workflow, which branch and version it is running on, which project and workflow has been triggered. If possible getting the expected execution time / finish time would be good b) For the “End” event I would like to know how long the execution took and if it was successful or not. I would also like to know if artifacts have been created or if deployments have been done. If the “End” is because of a failure, I would love to know the failure reason (e.g. tests failed, deployment failed, …) c) For the state transitions I’d love to know the “time since started” and “expected completion time”. I would also like to, obviously, know the state that has been completed and the one that will now be started. d) For approvals I’d love to be able to get the information about the approval ask and all required information (commit Id, branch) to do the approval
What does CodeCatalyst Support today?
Right now CodeCatalyst allows to set up notifications to Slack. Please see details on how to set this up here. This notifications are also minimal right now:
In Slack this looks like this:
How can I enhance the notification possibilities?
Luckily one of the “core actions” is the possibility to trigger a Lambda function and this is what we are going to use here to be able to trigger advanced notifications using Amazon SNS. In our example we are going to use this to send an eMail to a specific address, but you can also use any other destinations supported by SNS like SMS or AWS ChatBot.
Setting up pre-requisites
Unfortunately we will need to set up an SNS topic and a Lambda function in a dedicated AWS account in order to use these advanced notifications. This means that we are “breaking” the concept of CodeCatalyst not requiring access to the AWS Console, but this is the only way that I found so far to be able to send additional notifications.
Ideally we would be setting up the SNS topic and the lambda function using CDK, but that increases the complexity of the workflow and of the setup and because of that I’m not including that in this blog post.
Setting up the SNS topic
Please create a SNS topic following the AWS documentation through the console. We assume the topic to be in “eu-central-1” and the name to be “codecatalyst-workflow-topic“.
You can follow this blog post to manually set up the lambda function through the AWS console, please ensure to give the Lambda functions permissions to use the SNS topic. The required code using Python will look like this:
Obviously the same can be achieved using Typscript, Go or any other supported function. Please adjust the topic_arn to match the topic that you just created. After creation this Lambda function will now have an ARN which should look similar to this: arn:aws:lambda:eu-central-1:<accountId>:function:send-sns-notification-python
We will need this ARN when setting up the notification in our Workflow.
Integration into the workflow
Integrating this Lambda function into a workflow is easy:
As you can see, we are integrating an “aws/lambda-invoke@v1” action which then points to the lambda function that we just created.
In the “RequestPayload” we are passing a few information to the Lambda function which will then be passed to the SNS topic as part of the message. This is how the message will look when received as eMail:
Missing information and next steps for enhanced notifications
As you can see we are able to send notifications from CodeCatalyst to multiple targets, including eMail with this option.
What we are missing is – and I am not sure if thats possible or not – is all of the “metadata” of the workflow execution like:
Workflow-Name
State-Name
Project Name and additional information
In the documentation I was not able to find out the available environment variables about these information…. If you do have any ideas on how to access this metadata, please let me know!
In the last weeks – or already months – I’ve been working together with Christian, also an AWS Community Builder, on our project named “Football Match Center”. Christian has already been writing a lot about our project on LinkedIn:
Today, I want to put the attention on our chosen framework for the UI and the way that we are connecting from the UI to the backend. Our backend in this project is a GraphQL API endpoint hosted on AWS AppSync.
Building our UI in Flutter
Since last year Amplify Flutter includes support for Web and Desktop. As we are looking to reach users both on mobile as also on the desktop, choosing a cross-platform development tool like Flutter seemed to be an obvious choice. Christian and I are a small team, and we want to focus on building a simple UI quickly without the need to implement for multiple platforms and Flutter allows exactly that.
Flutter provides easily extendable widgets that can be used on all major platforms.
Connecting to our GraphQL backend
Our project is not based on an Amplify backend, but on AWS infrastructure written in AWS CDK. This made it rather difficult to use the Amplify Flutter SDK as most of the documentations and blog posts expect you to connect the Amplify SDK with an Amplify backend (which can then include a GraphQL API).
But that’s not only what made it difficult – I also had very little experience with Amplify or the Amplify SDK when starting to work on the connection.
Using the Flutter SDK for Amplify we will be connecting to our Cognito instance for Authentication and to our existing GraphQL endpoint. In this post I am going to look at the GraphQL connection and not on the integration of Cognito as an authentication endpoint.
Setting up Amplify SDK for Flutter can be done through the amplify cli if you are starting a new project.
This will then also create the required amplifyconfiguration.dart and some example code through amplify init.
You can then set up the Amplify SDK for Flutter from within your main widget using this code:
import 'package:amplify_flutter/amplify_flutter.dart';
import 'package:amplify_api/amplify_api.dart';
import 'amplifyconfiguration.dart';
import 'models/ModelProvider.dart';
….
Future<void> _configureAmplify() async {
final api = AmplifyAPI(modelProvider: ModelProvider.instance);
await Amplify.addPlugin(api);
await Amplify.configure(amplifyconfig);
try {
await Amplify.configure(amplifyconfig);
} on AmplifyAlreadyConfiguredException {
safePrint(
'Tried to reconfigure Amplify; this can occur when your app restarts on Android.');
}
}
While this looks easy when reading the documentation (and a lot of very good blog posts), this was rather difficult for me as I was not able to use the amplify init command. Finding out the structure of the “amplifyconfiguration.dart” and the implementation for the “ModelProvider” were my main challenges.
Lately, the related documentation has been updated and it is now easier to work with existing resources.
The Amplify Configuration file
The Amplify Configuration (amplifyconfiguration.dart) configures all of the required Amplify Plugins. In our implementation we started with the GraphQL backend:
This tells the Amplify SDK to talk to a specific API endpoint when the “Amplify.API” is invoked. As far as I understand this Github issue, right now only one API can be queried from a specific Amplify instance.
When using the apiKey to do the authentication with the API, we will need to regularly update the Flutter application as the default API expires after 7 days.
This documentation was not available when we started to work on the project and I have the suspicion that Salih made this happen 🙂 (if not, still THANKS for the help you gave me! 🙂)
The ModelProvider
The ModelProvider should be a generated file, which you can generate from an existing GraphQL API. If you are using a schema that is not managed by Amplify, you will need to use “amplify codegen” based on an existing schema file.
The command expects a schema.graphql to be available in the “root” folder of the Amplify Flutter project. If you execute “amplify codegen models”, required Dart files will be generated in the “lib/models” directory.
The result should be a file similar to this one:
import 'package:amplify_core/amplify_core.dart';
import 'Match.dart';
import 'PaginatedMatches.dart';
import 'PaginatedTeams.dart';
import 'Team.dart';
export 'Match.dart';
export 'PaginatedMatches.dart';
export 'PaginatedTeams.dart';
export 'Team.dart';
class ModelProvider implements ModelProviderInterface {
@override
String version = "4ba35f5f4a47ee16223f0e1f4adace8d";
@override
List<ModelSchema> modelSchemas = [Match.schema, PaginatedMatches.schema, PaginatedTeams.schema, Team.schema];
static final ModelProvider _instance = ModelProvider();
@override
List<ModelSchema> customTypeSchemas = [];
static ModelProvider get instance => _instance;
ModelType getModelTypeByModelName(String modelName) {
switch(modelName) {
case "Match":
return Match.classType;
case "PaginatedMatches":
return PaginatedMatches.classType;
case "PaginatedTeams":
return PaginatedTeams.classType;
case "Team":
return Team.classType;
default:
throw Exception("Failed to find model in model provider for model name: " + modelName);
}
}
}
Querying our GraphQL API
Now that we have been able to connect to our GraphQL AWS AppSync endpoint, we can start querying data.
Luckily, the preparations we made and the Amplify for Flutter SDK provides convenience methods that returned typed data structures that we can directly interact or work with.
You only need to write the GraphQL query that you are interested in and you can directly read data from the endpoint. In my example below I’m creating a Flutter Widget out of the returned elements and then I am adding them to a list of Widgets that I can display in a Column Widget:
Future<List<TeamWidget>> _getMatchesByCountry(String country) async {
List<TeamWidget> teamsWidgetList = [];
try {
String graphQLDocument = '''query ListTeams {
getTeamsByCountry(country: "${country}") {
nextToken
teams {
PK
PrimaryColor
SK
SecondaryColor
TeamName
}
}
}''';
var operation = Amplify.API
.query(request: GraphQLRequest<String>(document: graphQLDocument));
var response = await operation.response;
var data = response.data;
if (data != null) {
Map<String, dynamic> userMap = jsonDecode(data);
List<dynamic> matches = userMap["getTeamsByCountry"]["teams"];
matches.forEach((element) {
if (element != null) {
if (element["id"] == null) {
element["id"] = "rnd-id";
}
var match = Team.fromJson(element);
teamsWidgetList.add(TeamWidget(match));
}
});
}
} on ApiException catch (e) {
print('Query failed: $e');
}
return teamsWidgetList;
}
Just today, we have merged a feature that adds a “subscription” to our AppSync endpoint – as as next step we plan to integrate this within the Amplify Flutter Application which will then allow us to implement notifications to the end users. Unfortunately, the Amplify SDK for Flutter does not yet support in-app messaging as it does for Javascript.
What YOU learned – and what I learned
Through this blog post you have learned how to connect an Flutter application with Amplify using the Flutter SDK for Amplify. You have also got to know our project, the “Football Match Center” – and you’ve seen some code to make your start easier when talking to a GraphQL (AppSync) backend.
I have learned to work with the Amplify for Flutter SDK and also how code generators can help you to speed up your implementation. I’ve also gained experiences in accessing data from AppSync and on working with the returned data in Flutter.
Unfortunately, I have also found out that using the Flutter SDK for Amplify I can right now not implement the planned in-app notifications that Christian and I wanted to build for our Football Match Center to notify users about upcoming or recently completed games.
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?
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 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.
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:
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.
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:
General
Single Sign On without Builder ID – Okta/Ping/etc.
Other regions support
Allow “Open Source” projects
Issues / Tracking
Epics
Roadmap / Timeline
Integration with Workflows & Automation
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
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?
A few weeks ago, on december 1st 2022, Werner Vogels announced Amazon CodeCatalyst. I’ve previously shared my initial thoughts and findings in a blog post. In this post, I’m going to share a few more findings and insights into using Amazon CodeCatalyst and will also see if any of my wishes from the wishlist for CI/CD on AWS have been resolved with CodeCatalyst.
What I have been playing around with…
CodeCatalyst login page
One of my personal projects that I am working on together with a few friends is pegasus-galaxy.net and the CI/CD pipeline that I had built with CDK Pipelines (that I also presented at re:Invent 2022) was the first one to try to move over. In context, we’re talking about a Flutter application for Web running behind CloudFront, deployed using CDK.
I decided to try CodeCatalyst out and go “all in” – and that means moving the code from Bitbucket into CodeCatalyst as well as setting up the other users in CodeCatalyst and moving the workflows (=CI/CD pipelines) over to CodeCatalyst.
CodeCatalyst Menu
In this article I am going to go through each of the sections in CodeCatalyst and will share my experiences, thoughts and findings.
Where I have ideas on how to improve the day-to-day work with the tool, will try to share that.
Before going into details, lets start with the most important thing:
Amazon CodeCatalyst works very well and reliable and the current version of the service is a great foundation for moving all of your CI/CD and development practices to AWS.
The CodeCatalyst team has been very supportive on re:Post, so if you have a question, feel free to ask it there!
CodeCatalyst Overview – Spaces and Projects
Spaces are the “Top-Level” option to organize your CodeCatalyst account. You will need to associate an AWS Account for billing used AWS resources. Each AWS (billing) account can be associated only with one CodeCatalyst Space.
CodeCatalyst Spaces Billing page
While this seems like a limitation as you will need to create a different billing account for a 2nd space, I can right now not see an impact for my day to day work. For anything that I run on the same AWS account, I would assume that using a project within the same space should be good.
You can manage Projects, Members and AWS Account connections on the space page. In the “extensions”, CodeCatalyst currently allows a connection only to the JIRA Cloud. I would expect that additional 3rd party extensions will be supported in the GA version of CodeCatalyst.
Projects Overview and options
A project is a “unit of work” in your product or software that you are building. Within projects, you can manage issues, manage your code repositories, execute workflows (CI/CD) and review report results.
Projects are associated to a Space – and you can create as much projects in a Space as you want. You can add team members to a project, that are not able to access all projects in the space. Unfortunately I have not yet found an option to “hide” projects from Team members that are added on the Space itself.
Managing issues / tickets
CodeCatalyst currently provides two options to manage your issues or tasks: 1) Link to JIRA Cloud Project 2) Internal issue management
If you use the option to link to a JIRA cloud project, the “issues” link is replaced by a link to your JIRA Cloud project.
Internal issue management
The internal issue management system currently offers everything that is required for a simple Kanban workflow. You can create issues, add them to a backlog or a Kanban board, assign them to project members and track their current status. I personally think that the current functionalities are good enough for small teams and simple projects – I’m actually already working with it in a small project and will add additional feedback as soon as I gain more experience.
Code
Within the “Source” part of a project, you can manage source repositories or connections to source repositories in Github. I expect that other providers will be added going forward (e.g. Gitlab, CodeCommit, Bitbucket, …). You can also manage pull requests and approvals – I was only able to test this using internal source repositories, not using a linked repository.
The last option – the Dev Environments – is the most exciting functionality – it gives you the possibility to host development environments (similar to Gitpod) on AWS using Cloud9 but also, and this is really cool, using Visual Studio or JetBrains IDEs. When using that option, the IDE on your local PC is only the “presentation layer”, the source code is stored and run on an AWS instance and the IDE uses remote connectivity to talk to the Dev Environment in the background.
CI/CD
CodeCatalyst currently uses the same approach as Github Actions to manage your workflows or CI/CD pipelines – you are able to manage your Workflows using YAML files. The syntax is simple and understandable. There is a minimal set of Actions available as part of the preview. You are also able to use existing Github Actions as part of your workflow.
Workflow overview in CodeCatalyst
The workflow functionality is very powerful. In my tests I have not yet been able to test all parts of the capabilities. Workflows can be defined for certain directories, for certain triggers or branches. Test reports will be exposed in the “reports” functionality.
CodeCatalyst offers a graphical overview for workflows and alows to edit them in the UI, too. This functionaly works pretty well and helps to quickly get you started building your first workflow in CodeCatalyst.
I’ll need to test the workflows more to be able to give additional insights into how good or bad they are currently running. My simple pipeline that builds a Flutter Application, deploys my Infrastructure as Code using CDK and then publishes the new version of the Flutter app runs without problems.
One of my main concerns so far is the execution time, however the team has been working on a possibility to use Lambda as an execution environment. This option however does not yet support the execution of Github actions and also has some other limitations.
The other features that are part of the “CI/CD” – Environments, Compute and Secrets – I did not have time to play around with this. If you have any experiences with it, please add your thoughts in a comment to this article!
Reports
The reports today only suport test reports. I have not used the functionality enough to assess this, but I am sure that the CodeCatalyst team is going to add additional reporting options going forward.
Things I like most about CodeCatalyst (Preview) after 6 weeks of usage
Just a short list of things that I already like: – Integration of Github Actions as workflow actions – Managing workflows using UI & code
Things I miss in CodeCatalyst (Preview) after 6 weeks of usage
– macOS builds (e.g. for Flutter iOS apps) are still not possible – granular permissions for workflow and Pull Request triggers – and….
Let’s talk about Open Source Projects
Right now there is no option to share a project or a repository that is hosted within CodeCatalyst as an Open Source project. This is really a limitation if you want to use CodeCatalyst for Open Source project – or if I would like to share a CodeCatalyst repository with example workflows. I hope this functionality will be added soon.
Wrap up and next steps for me with CodeCatalyst
I need to admit – writing this post took longer than expected 🙂 I wanted to publish it before christmas and now it seems to be a bit “late” already as I am sure that a lot of you have made your own experiences with CodeCatalyst today – please SHARE your findings with me – links of Blogs that you have written or other content you have created, I am eager to consume it!
My next steps with CodeCatalyst
I am working on migrating my project pegasus-galaxy.net completely to CodeCatalyst and collaborate with my team on it there. With that, I will be able to proof CodeCatalyst in a “real world” application that it is “multi-platform” application – using Flutter for Web, Android and iOS – and a Serverless AWS based backend. If you’re interested to join this project, please do not hesitate to reach out – skills that we need right now: AppSync, DynamoDB and development/software engineering (Flutter, Typescript, Java, or Node?)
As we are now in the post:Invent phase of 2022 and over 10 days have passed since re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas was concluded, it’s time for a lot of re:Cap Blog posts and events. I’ve read so many of those “major announcments” articles that I’ve decided to write a different type of re:Cap for myself this year: Sharing a few stories from my 10+ days in Las Vegas, as they are as equally important as the technical announcements made by AWS.
Indeed, it was a great conference with a lot of learnings and a lot of very interesting sessions. I focused on Chalk Talks, Builder’s sessions and events (like Gameday) as these are not recorded.
Making new friends before re:Invent kicks off
My flight this year got moved from Saturday to Friday, so I had one more day to get over Jet-Lag. On Friday, I spend a good time shopping and besides that met with Oliver vor dinner. On saturday morning (early morning!), I looked at the AWS Community Builders Slack and found out that Traian set up a “spontanous breakfast” for the Jet-lagged folks – and I ended up sitting over two hours with different parties, having fun, chatting and getting to know people. It was exciting to meet Rafael, who had been our Solutions Architect for a while, for the first time in person – without planning it 🙂 It was also great to meet Heitor in person – the person that owns the Lambda Power Tools at AWS. His talk is now on Youtube and I would encourage you to listen to it if you are interested in Open Source.
The rest of the saturday I spend with Markus, who shared so much Las Vegas knowledge with me that I think my brain is still burning – and I would not dare to claim remembering more than half of what we discussed – but it was a great saturday which ended with meeting Philipp for dinner at “The Cheasecake factory”.
I kicked off the sunday with a lot of excitement about my very first talk at re:Invent – final technical check in the “Speaker Ready Room” for my slide deck! That needed to be early morning, because afterwards I had planned to go out hiking with fellow AWS Community Builders.
Hiking across time zones and cultures
Definately one of my highlights this year: The ever first AWS Community Builders pre:Invent Hiking Trip!
Thanks to everyone that joined – Oliver, Richard, Jenn, Ganesh, Traian, Pubudu, Niklas. It was great to see how we supported each other, had great conversations and all managed to get across different challenges we had to fight!
Thank you Oliver (and kreuzwerker) for the amazing video. Traian, you’re my hero. Congratulations on finishing off the hike with us with. Thats an achievement noone can take away.
It was fascinating to meet you all for the first time and notice that we get a long well, without ever meeting before. That’s the power of the AWS community!
We got back at 6pm, after a over 5 hours hike, just in time to get our AWS re:Invent badges and to meet other AWS Community Builders from around the globe for a great dinner. Lilly & Jason – thanks for joining us, that really made me happy!
Welcome to re:Invent
Kicking off re:Invent with a GameDay with a great team an Jeff Barr
I decided to kick off my re:Invent on Monday with a GameDay – which is a fascinating opportunity for gamified learning. On sunday, during our hike, I had aligned with Niklas to form a team together – and the other two team members, JaeJun and Martin, we met in the morning. We had great fun, ended up 4th even tho Jeff Barr distracted us for some time as we won him on our table with a quizz. It was great meeting him in person – and I can tell you: He is a human as we are, even if his Newsblog is legendary 🙂
Meeting people from the AWS Community
I had so much great hours in Las Vegas – thanks for the time spend together, everyone that I’ve met – Stefanie, Oliver, Manuel, Mike, Stefan, Philipp, Markus, Thorsten – and others – from the german community.
Finally met Danielle and Matt in person. Another of my highlights.
The Community Builders Mixer and the User Group Leader Mixer where both great events to get to know each other better and network with great people from everywhere in the world. I met so many people that I had been interacting with in written (Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn) – it was a blast for myself.
Famous Jenga-game with AWS Heros – so much fun!
Famous Jenga-game with AWS Heros – so much fun!
Speaking at re:Invent 2022 – my DevChat
As I’ve already shared before this year I had the opportunity to speak at re:Invent – COM307 – Using CDK pipelines (in Java) to build a multi-platform Flutter application
Thanks for everyone that made this possible: Ernesto, Shantavia, Lilly, Jason, Maria! It was my biggest honor to share my experiences and my open source initiative. Looking forward to keep sharing knowledge!
Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst
With the announcement of Amazon CodeCatalyst the conference brought for me a new service that I am eager to use and try out as I am very much interested in CI/CD on AWS. This was for me definately the most exciting anouncement of re:Invent 2022 and I had a lot of interest to talk to the service team, product managers and others after the service had been announced. I’m looking forward to share more about that as I get to play around with it more.
Flying out
On saturday my trip to re:Invent was over and it ended as my re:Invent trip began: meeting AWS interested persons at the airport (Thanks Maria for the introduction!) and with great conversations with Oliver on the way back to Frankfurt.
Thanks to everyone that I met and talked to at re:Invent 2022 – you really made this conference be a different one for me than it was before.
I’m looking forward to hopefully meet all of you again in 2023!
In this post you are going to get to know the new service that AWS announced at re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas. With this new service AWS brings the Code* tools (CodeStar, CodeBuild, CodePipelines, etc.) into one user interface and opens up the usage to new audiences.
Amazon CodeCatalyst is a service that helps you to manage your project code in a central place and allows integrating it with existing CI/CD tools. It also simplifies the cross account functionalities of CI/CD best practices. With the market place functionality it opens up the tool for further expansion through third party contributors.
Functionality highlights
Organizations and projects
CodeCatalyst allows the set up of an organization and projects within that organization. This allows a structured set up of your projects and allows you to segregate access. What I have not been able to verify is if existing organizations of AWS Organizations are automatically imported and available in the service. This would be beneficial for larger organizations that want to get started with CI/CD on AWS.
Integration with your “builder ID”
Amazon CodeCatalyst is integrated with AWS your builder id – and that means that you can have a unique, personal account. This account is not tied or attached to an existing AWS account. The integration with the AWS accounts it done through cross account permissions that are created automatically for you. This concept has various benefits:
You (as a developer) can have access to the required CI/CD structure and code management without the requirement to have an IAM user or access to the AWS console to the specific AWS account that you are aiming to deploy to
You (as a developer) can have access to different “organizations” and “projects” within the service – which will make it easier for 3rd party teams working on AWS projects (e.g. consultancy engagements)
You can allow the CodeCatalyst workflows to only be able to deploy into certain accounts and the list of accounts that you can connect to from a specific project or organization can be modified on demand
Unified user interface and workflows
The new user interface of CodeCatalyst allows to look at the complete lifecycle of your product – form development to deployment – within the same window. You can easily set up a project, connect or set up a repository and then create a CI/CD pipeline (or workflow) for it. You will also be able to visualize the workflow of your CI/CD pipeline during creation or editing.
Integration of Github Actions
With the integration of existing Github actions and the possibility to re-use already available automation steps within your workflow AWS opens the door to re-use and migrate a lot of already existing functionality. This is going to be very beneficial and will help to drive the adoption of the service. The availability of “native” actions as part of CodeCatalyst is still limited and I assume with the Marketplace new actions will be made available quickly and the list of available actions will grow rapidly.
Project Templates – CI/CD pipelines
I believe that this is the most important functionality of the service. Allowing to quickly set up new applications, workflows or projects on the service empowers developers to get started efficiently. I’m eager to see additional templates going forward. As you can include both infrastructure and application code, but also the required workflow in a template (=that’s your deployment pipeline), I hope that with this functionality we will be able to empower developers to re-use better CI/CD pipelines that enforce a DevSecOps mindset and include all of the “best practices”. I would love to see all of the reference implementations of the “DPRA” (Deployment Pipeline Reference Implementation) implemented as templates in this service.
A good, automated CI/CD pipeline helps your developers to focus on creating business value – the more you can “re-use” or drive through standards and templates, there more efficient your teams will be.
Additional wishes
As I have not explored all areas of CodeCatalyst yet, some of my “wishes” might already be implemented and I did not yet discover them – here’s a few things that I’d love to see but haven’t found yet. Please reach out to me if this is functionality that is available somewhere and I’ve missed to find it 😊
Re-applying project templates
I would love to be able to re-apply a project template to an existing project, especially for the workflows. This allows two things: 1) if you’ve changed the workflow and it doesn’t work anymore, you can quickly go back to the working version. 2) if the template changes, you can re-apply the changes to a project without the need to access every project manually.
In combination, some times a project changes or evolves and you might want to move it from a “backend” project-template to a “full-stack” project. This can today only be achieve manually but not in an automated fashion.
Better “mobile app” support
As you’ve maybe read, I’m working on a “Flutter” application – and because of that I would really love to see a possibility in CodeCatalyst that better supports the “cross platform” app functionality. Today, the service mainly focuses on provisioning AWS infrastructure. As you build a complex project that also needs to publish a mobile application, it would be very bene be able to use the service to also publish the application itself into the different stores automatically. Of course there are other, 3rd party systems that already allow that, but if you want to use CI/CD natively on AWS this is currently not possible. I know I’ve mentioned that before, but as I have not seen the possibility to perform an iOS build on CodeCatalyst, I wanted to highlight it again.
Additional 3rd party integrations / workflows
One of the assets of the service is definitely the market place functionality that will quickly allow to integrate new 3rd party services. What I would like to see here is the support of additional repository stores besides Github (e.g. Bitbucket, Gitlab, and the corresponding “datacenter” versions), but also the possibility of a native integration of other tools that are required as part of the CI/CD pipeline – things like Codecov, SonarQube, Checkmarx, Snyk, Aquasec, etc. This might be possible through custom actions, but I am not yet clear on how fast these will be available.
Infrastructure as Code support for provisioning and setting up your CodeCatalyst environment
I’m not clear about the possibility to set up your CodeCatalyst environment through Cloudformation/CLI calls or through CDK/Terraform and I am unsure if that would be something that is required for this service. What would definitely be good to have is the possibility to set up integrations to your existing accounts and projects in an automated form – the CLI commands make that possible, but that’s not the same as directly defining it “as code”.
Native branch support for projects & workflows
CodeCatalyst allows to refer to different branches, but it would be cool to get a possibility to natively support “ephemeral” environments as part of your CI/CD process. There are two use cases that I have in mind:
Integration tests as part of the CI/CD process (workflow) that require the infrastructure to be available and provisioned
Environments to replicate/test defects or new functionality
For both of these use cases, the CI/CD tool should be able to deploy an environment from a branch – and then also automatically de-provision it based on rules. Today this is something that you would need to manually replicate within your workflows and infrastructure as code.
Overall summary and outlook
The service is overall is a great addition (or maybe a replacement?) of the existing Code* tools on AWS and it streamlines a lot of things that were previously not working perfectly on AWS. For a new service it’s a solid launch with a lot of benefits, especially for small companies or open source projects that do not have the possibility to use existing third party tools or really just want to focus on generating business value. I do not think that CodeCatalyst will be able to replace existing Jenkins installations or services for bigger enterprises right now, as there are a few things that are not yet possible.
What do you think of CodeCatalyst? Please share your thoughts and feedback with me (either on the comments, on LinkedIn or by mail.
At re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas AWS has announced a new feature for AWS Lambda that allows you to reduce your lambda startup times for Java based functions – SnapStart. With this post you are going to understand how the feature works, how it can be enabled, how you will benefit from it and how it will reduce your costs for AWS lambda. The functionality needs to be activated (“opt-in”) and has a few pre-requites for your functions that I will also share with you. It is currently only available if you use Java (Corretto 11) as a runtime. Other runtimes (e.g. Python, Typescript) will be available at a later date.
What is AWS Lambda SnapStart – and reduced latency for cold starts?
SnapStart is a new feature that helps to improve the “cold starts” of your lambda function.
AWS Lambda is a serverless possibility to execute code or a part of your application on AWS. The service can be used with different languages – Typescript/Node.JS, Python, Golang, … and Java. Lambda can be seen as “function as a service” with very convenient integration possibilities. Under the hood of Lambda, AWS has a very quick and mature provisioning system that brings up a container that executes your code. AWS Lambda as a “serverless” service allows you to not pay anything for your deployed infrastructure if it is not being used – this is also known as “scale-to-zero”. AWS Lambda is billed by “usage time” of the capacity that your lambda functions use – a lambda function can run up to 15min, but most of the lambda functions execute within a few seconds. Because of the “scale-to-zero” functionality, there is not always a “running” version of your code on AWS. This is where AWS distinguishes between “cold starts” and “warm starts” for your lambda function.
When SnapStart is enabled, function code is initialized once when a function version is published. Lambda then takes a snapshot of the memory and disk state of the initialized execution environment, persists the encrypted snapshot, and caches it for low-latency access. When the function is first invoked or subsequently scaled, Lambda resumes new execution environments from the persisted snapshot instead of initializing from scratch, avoiding several seconds of variable latency.
So – why is SnapStart an “opt-in” feature?
AWS has decided to not make SnapStart a default functionality of AWS Lambda, because there are certain pre-requisites for being able to use this new functionality.
The most important one is that the code executed as part of the lambda function cannot rely on the “randomization” features of Java, and this has implications for the code that you write. Please read the SnapChart documentation for further details – the FAQ is very detailed on this. This does not only include the code that YOU write as part of your lambda function but also the code of every library that you use as part of your code.
Other things to consider are that you cannot rely on network connections that you created/set up during the initialization of your code to be still valid and available when your function is resumed from a snapshort. This means that you will need to verify any network connections (e.g. connections for a backend database) before you actually use it.
Any ephemeral data that you rely on can be invalid when your function is resumed from a snapshot – and this means that you will need to ensure that any ephemeral data is still valid if you want to access it. This could be temporary credentials, machine learning models or just temporary data that you use within your function.
In it’s documentation, AWS also provides a bunch of examples and best practices to make sure that your code is “SnapSafe” and can work with this new functionality without causing problems.
How do you activate AWS Lambda SnapStart?
You can activate AWS Lambda either in the AWS console or through the AWS cli. Surprisingly this feature also comes with direct CloudFormation, CDK and SDK support. Please remember that after activating it, you will need to create a new version of lambda function that you want to test.
Further details can be found in the AWS documentation.
Let’s go back to the “teaser” of this post – How can YOU safe costs with this functionality?
For Lambda functions you are based on the number of requests for your functions, the allocated memory and the time that it takes to execute your java code. The duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminated, rounded up to the nearest 1ms.
The total duration is a combination of the initialization code (in the constructor of your function) and the code in the “handler”. With SnapStart enabled, the “initialization code” / phase is moved to the provisioning of the function (when you set it up) – and when the function is executed the “initialization phase” is replaced by re-starting the function from the already created snapshot.
This means that for functions, that have an intense “initialization” phase the potential savings are bigger than for functions that run all of their code in the “handler”. More details around how to optimize your Java functions for cold starts can be found in this blog.
Let’s do a few calculations on how this helps us to safe money:
The table assumes that the initialization phase is reduced to 25 milliseconds (which is not technically correct according to the AWS documentation, but its as close as I can guess today).
What this table shows is that the SnapStart feature will help us to reduce our costs for AWS Lambda significantly, if we have Lambda functions that have a longer initialization time than “handler” execution time.
Overall I calculated between 10% and 60% savings with this feature, depending on your use case. Please be aware: This is calculation/guessing only, I have not yet measured that during a test! For further analysis and details you will need to analyze your current performance metrics of your lambda functions and perform additional tests and calculations. Before you can use the feature, as already mentioned, you will need to verify that your lambda code is “SnapSafe”.
If you try out this new feature and gain meaningful experiences out of it, please let me know and reach out to me in the comments section, through LinkedIn or E-Mail.
re:Invent 2022 is about to start in Las Vegas and I am really looking forward to all of the sessions, the gamified learning possibilities and all of the other things that make the conference great. But more than that, AWS re:Invent this year feels for me like “coming home” instead of “going to a conference”.
After that a lot of things changed for me and I would like to share some of them with you!
I got added to the Community Builders program and with that I gained access to great networking opportunities, sessions, talks and events and also some information that are not publicly available. Next, I introduced myself to a bunch of folks and people and quickly interacted and connected with other Builders around the globe. I saw the Call for Papers (CfP) for CDK day and we had a great panel discussion with a few builders – Danielle, Saima, Christian and Matt – about “The local cloud” at CDK Day 2022. Afterwards I attended the AWS Summit in Berlin and got to know a lot of great people of the AWS Community DACH in person (just to mention a few: Linda, Markus, Thorsten, Aaron, Stefan, Nora, Henning…). This summit made me understand how important community work is for me and how much I gain from talking and networking – re:Meet, as Christian recently said.
I kept enjoying conversations with a lot of builders, getting to know a lot of them better. Later in the year, I kicked off the “AWS UserGroup Bergstraße” and we started having regular meetups. I also joined the “AWS Community Day DACH” organizational group and helped to found the “AWS Community Support Organization” for the AWS DACH community…and was able to give a presentation at the AWS Community Day 2022 in Dresden. I met more great members of the AWS community, got to know them in person and spend time with them.
As part of the Community Builders program there also was a CfP for talks & sessions at re:Invent 2022 – I submitted four talks and as I already mentioned I was fortunate and one of them has been selected as a DevChat for this year’s re:Invent.
At that time I decided that I would be attending re:Invent in person, to get the chance to give the talk and share my experiences. I did not know that no one from my company or close friends would be joining me in Las Vegas. I was expecting to take along a few of my close friends and colleagues. Instead, I’m on my way to re:Invent alone.
And still, I’m coming home and I have the feeling its going to be the best re:Invent I have ever attended.
I’ll be meeting a lot of Community Builders I have never seen before – even on the flight today there were a few people I knew “from the community” and from my other investments into AWS (Tobias, Oliver, Henning, …). On Sunday, we’re going to be doing the ever-first pre:Invent Community Builders Hiking event with more than 10 builders I’ve never met before. Afterwards, we will be meeting up with more than 20 builders for a self-organized dinner event.
And then, on Monday, the conference will start where, I will feel like being part of the “big AWS builders family” that Werner was talking about at his keynote a few years ago.
The whole week is filled with meetings, 1on1, sessions – and dinners, parties,…
These things make me feel at home in Las Vegas!
Looking forward to meet all of you in person and talk, learn and have fun. Reach out if you want to meet me “live”. 😊
I can’t be more thankful to be part of this great community.
As I’ve been sharing before, I am very fortunate this year and will be giving a DevChat at the biggest AWS conference of the world – at re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas.
AWS offers different tools for all parts of your CI/CD lifecyle. In this post I am going to cover the set of Code* tools that are available on AWS today – and will share my thoughts about what these tools are missing.
As part of the preparation for the talk and as part of both my private project (code-name: MPAGA) and my main job @ FICO I have been researching and learning a lot about CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) – and for the private projects especially around CI/CD that natively runs on AWS. I’ve found out that not everything that these tools offer today is perfect and wanted to share some ideas on what could be improved. Where possible or applicable, I will also propose workarounds or alternatives.
We will look at a few of the tools in the order of the “product lifecycle”: 1. Code 2. Build/Test 3. Deploy 4. Release
Tools that are part of the “Code” phase
For the purpose of this post we are going to focus on tools that are natively offered by AWS as already mentioned and part of your CI/CD pipeline.
AWS CodeStar – Integration of projects
AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS and provides a unified interface for your project. It provides you different templates that you can choose from to quickly start your project.
It allows you to manage your team, with permissions and integrates with your existing JIRA for issue management. It also integrates with your IDE (or with Cloud9). You can also integrate with an existing Github repository.
AWS CodeCommit – hosted Git
AWS CodeCommit is a managed service for Git (just like Bitbucket, Github, Gitlab, …. It provides a hosted “git” environment that is encrypted at rest and can be accessed using usual Git clients.
AWS CodeGuru
Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool that provides intelligent recommendations to improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code. Integrate CodeGuru into your existing software development workflow to automate code reviews during application development and continuously monitor application’s performance in production and provide recommendations and visual clues on how to improve code quality, application performance, and reduce overall cost.
Tools that are part of the “Build” or “Test” phase
AWS CodePipeline – Tool to manage your CI/CD pipeline
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
AWS CodeBuild – Build tool based on containers
AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.
AWS CodeArtifact – artifact storage
AWS CodeArtifact allows you to store artifacts using popular package managers and build tools like Maven, Gradle, npm, Yarn, Twine, pip, and NuGet.
Tools that are part of the “deploy” phase
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to various compute services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers.
AWS FIS
AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) is a fully managed service for running fault injection experiments to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.
Tools that are part of the “Release” phase
AWS AppConfig (part of Systems Manager)
AWS AppConfig makes it easy for customers to quickly and safely configure, validate, and deploy feature flags and application configuration.
Wishlist
I’ve been able to gain some experience with the tools while working on a few projects, including cdk-codepipeline-flutter and here is a list of things that I believe could be improved. My main focus here is on CodePipeline, as it serves as the glue between all of the other tools.
Native branch support for CodePipelines
Working with Jenkins and the MultiBranch plugin makes it easy to allow developers to quickly test and deploy code that they are working on using the CI/CD pipeline. Unfortunately, CodePipeline today does not allow automated branch discovery, so if you want to enable the automated execution of a pipeline for a branch, you will need to manually configure webhooks and then create a new pipeline (or delete an existing pipeline) when branches are created (or deleted). This is not easy to implement and it would be great if CodePipeline should natively allow creating a pipeline automatically for all branches of a linked Git repository.
Additional Templates and Best Practices
When setting up a CI/CD pipeline on AWS CodePipeline, this would be easier to use if additional best practices and templates would be available as part of the tool itself. AWS is starting to promote a new Open Source project called “Deployment Pipeline Reference Architecture“. this is a step in the right direction, but it needs to be expanded by other flavours of a deployment pipeline. Also the code examples need to be improved, made up to date and needs to include all languages supported by AWS CDK. This is critical to allow an efficient adoption of the different tools.
Native integration of 3rd party tools
AWS CodePipeline should natively support integrations to other 3rd party tools that should be part of your CI/CD pipeline – e.g. security scans like Aquasec and Checkmarx.
Remove dependency for a specific AWS account and support Cross-Account deployments natively
As indicated in this AWS Blog post, the best practice for setting up a CI/CD pipeline and for managing your deployments is to use multiple, different accounts to manage your deployments. CI/CD should not be bound to an account level and this includes the management of your accounts that are able to access and configure the CI/CD tools. Maybe a good option here would be the integration with the AWS Identity service. That might allow decoupling the CI/CD toolchain from the AWS account.
Up to date CodeBuild images
Docker Images provided by the CodeBuild team should be updated regularly and should support all “modern” toolkits. The open source project has some activity, but an issue for supporting newer Android versions is now open for some time…
Publishing options to the different mobile stores (AppStore, Play Store, Windows Store, etc….) should be possible
I’ve been looking at developing a mobile app using Flutter, but what I have not yet been able to achieve is pushing the created and build applications to the different app stores. Today, AWS does not support this natively. You CAN integrate this with 3rd party tools like CodeMagic, but natively there is no option on AWS to publish your application.
Wrap up
This concludes the wish list that I have today for the existing AWS CI/CD tools.
Did I miss anything that you believe should be added?
Use the comments to give feedback or reach out to me on LinkedIn or by E-Mail!
