AWS Codestar

Overview

AWS CodeStar is an integrated environment which allows you to develop software projects and gives you access to all the AWS tooling you may require. You can access source control, pipeline, build, deployment, release and monitoring tools (AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CloudWatch), as well as your deployed environments, be they IaaS (eg EC2), PaaS (eg Elastic Beanstalk) or serverless (AWS Lambda).

CodeStar bridges a gap between Development and Operations, thereby making it a great DevOps tool. Developers can get their code deployed, with infrastructure being created under-the-hood, with observability of the metrics and logs for the new application. All of this can be achieved quickly and from one interface.

Note, CodeStar is not an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE. For a cloud-based IDE, see AWS Cloud9

Collaboration

Collaboration is managed with the concept of teams, with different team members being given different access levels as appropriate for their role. This collaboration allows increased agility and faster release of new features.

Project templates

Templated projects are available for many different languages, allowing a quick start with all of the required AWS-native services pre-configured. This will save a huge amount of time and allow Developers to move straight to writing code, rather than spending time creating infrastructure before a single line of code is written.

Third Party Integrations

Third-party integrations are also available with GitHub for source control and Atlassian Jira for development workflow. If your organisation already uses these, this will be a great help.

Dashboards

Built-in dashboards, which are customisable, visualise the monitoring of your application, as well as development commit history and the CI/CD activity. Tiles displaying other items such as wiki documentation and Jira tickets can also be displayed.

When to use Codestar

We would recommend CodeStar when you have no existing build automation for application development. It will be a good place to start to demonstrate the power of DevOps automation and show real value in a short time. It will save a lot of time setting up all the integrations and prevent the traditional back-and-forth between Development and Operations when setting up environments for new projects.