News

AWS CodeStar Eases Building and Deployment of Java, Other Code on Amazon Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• April 25, 2017

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has unveiled a new cloud service for building and deploying applications on the AWS cloud computing platform. AWS CodeStar is designed to integrate with existing IDEs and abstract some of the steps needed to build a toolchain for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) on the cloud computing service.

The initial release of the service supports development in five programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Python. It comes pre-configured with a project management dashboard, an automated CD pipeline, and a Git code repository using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy. It also provides out-of-the-box integration with Atlassian's JIRA Software, which adds project management and issue tracking.

CodeStar (not to be confused with a lightweight WordPress framework of the same name) is free, but users pay for additional Amazon services.

Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, introduced the new service at the AWS Summit in San Francisco. The new service allows users to "easily manage your software development activities in one place… and set up your entire continuous delivery toolchain in minutes," he said. CodeStar comes with more than 20 templates, which can be used to configure the service to support the development of Web sites, Web Services, microservices and Alexa Skills (voice capabilities for devices such as Amazon's Echo).

CodeStar also comes with a project dashboard (a Web page) that provides an overall view of a project, its toolchain, and important events, Vogels explained. Through this dashboard, users can recent code commits and track things like the status of code changes, build results and deployments.

Vogels was especially enthusiastic about CodeStar's AWS Lambda template. "The cool thing in all this is that Lambda is one of the targets," he told Summit attendees, "so you can immediately set up continuous integration and deployment toward Lambda as one of your target environments." But the service also comes with templates for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk, a service for deploying and scaling Web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on a range of servers, including Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

The service also comes with sample code to help users get up and running quickly with popular IDEs, including Visual Studio and Eclipse, but also any code editor that supports Git, the company says.