The need to automate
Through the years web application development process changed many times. Over the last decade the need of automation of the development and deployment processes are more than recommended. This need demanded some platform to be developed that creates an easy to recreate steps of automated deployment. Many applications have been developed in the recent years(GoCD, Jenkins, Travis CI, TeamCity, Buildkite, Octupus, Bamboo, Team Foundation Server) that follow the pipeline model of development, testing and deployment so it is as easy as possible to isolate the problematic steps and take action without slowing down deployment.
In AWS context, this part was probably the only one missing from the huge service availability.
With the existence of AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Beanstalk, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Lambda, AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeCommit the only step missing and probably long time expected, was the quite recent appearance of AWS CodeStar.
What is it and what does it do?
WS CodeStar is a cloud-based service for creating, managing, and working with software development projects on AWS. You can quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS with an AWS CodeStar project. An AWS CodeStar project creates and integrates AWS services for your project development toolchain.
AWS CodeStar makes it easy for you to set up your entire development and continuous delivery tool chain for coding, building, testing, and deploying your application code. To start a project, you can choose from a variety of AWS CodeStar templates for Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. When you choose a project template, the underlying AWS services are provisioned in minutes, allowing you to quickly start coding and deploying your applications.
AWS CodeStar provides an easy way to coordinate your day-to-day development activities through a unified user interface, reducing the need to switch between various service consoles. AWS CodeStar’s project dashboard lets you monitor application activity, and track progress across all stages of your software development process, including code commits, builds, tests, and deployments, from a central place. AWS CodeStar integrates Atlassian JIRA Software, a third-party issue tracking and project management tool, allowing you to easily manage JIRA issues directly in the AWS CodeStar dashboard.
AWS CodeStar enables you to collaborate on projects across your team in a secure manner. You can easily manage access for project owners, contributors, and viewers without needing to manually configure your own policy for each service. AWS CodeStar simplifies the process of setting up project access for teams by providing built-in role-based policies that follow AWS Identity and Access Management best practices.
With AWS CodeStar project templates, you can easily develop a variety of applications such as websites, web applications, web services, and Alexa skills. AWS CodeStar project templates include the code for getting started on supported programming languages including Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python.