Things You Must Know about AWS CodeStar

In today’s post, I will discuss AWS CodeStar. In addition to that, I will also discuss, how it can make your life easier as a developer or DevOps person on AWS.

To be honest, all of us as a developer or DevOps people have struggled at some point to manage our application’s development, build, deployment and overall management.

So, first of all, I wanted to list out some of the issues that we face in our day-to-day dev activities.

Don’t want to miss any posts from us? join us on our Facebook group, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our newsletter below to not miss any updates from us.

In general, we faced problems like :

• How to store our code and its versions.
• How to build the code and deploy it.
• how to manage a CI/CD pipeline easily
• How to monitor our application activities like recent code commits or deployments.
• How to track issues related to projects and commits
• How to do all of the above in a minimal amount of time.

Almost three years ago, I started developing applications in the AWS cloud. I was so much worried about how I am going to handle all my above concerns in the AWS environment being a beginner.

But, to my surprise, CodeStar made my journey to the cloud smoother than ever. As a result, I was able to deliver my first version of the working application within a few days only.

All thanks to CodeStar.

I know, I know- Now you want to know more about CodeStar !!

let’s start then…

Informally If I say, CodeStar is kind of a one-stop solution for all the above problems.

Moreover, for the sake of definition, we will see what is CodeStar as per AWS.

What is AWS CodeStar?

AWS CodeStar is a service that helps you create, manage, and work with software development projects on Amazon Web Services.

In other words, If I say, CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build and deploy applications on AWS.

CodeStar basically wraps all the CI/CD services and brings it together under one umbrella.

So to be more precise, instead of being a new service- CodeStar brings all the existing DevOps services in AWS together and lets us handle them via a unified dashboard.

Let’s see some of the services that AWS brings under the hood to provide seamless continuous delivery.

• CodeCommit: For source code version control
• CodeBuild: To build and test your code
• CodeDeploy: To automate the deployment process
• CodePipeline: For configuring the complete CI/CD pipeline

What Can We do With CodeStar(High Level)

As we got a basic overview of CodeStar, therefore I am going to tell you some of the things that you can do with this amazing service 🙂

• Create New Project: With CodeStar, you can create a new project in your favourite language. You can edit the code, build and deploy on your choice of service on AWS all within a few minutes.
• Manage Access for Your Team: If you are a project owner, you can manage your team access from here. You can decide who can be a viewer, contributor etc.
• Collaborate Effectively: You can monitor all the project activities like recent code pushes, build status and deployments in a single dashboard.
• Quick Iteration With Required Tools: CodeStar has an integrated development toolchain for the project you create. That means as soon as you push the code, your changes are automatically deployed.

AWS CodeStar Pricing

AWS CodeStar itself is a free service. However, you pay for all resources that you use. Those resources can be anything for instance computing, storage or other services. Now that’s cool 🙂

So if the pricing convinced you to try it out, have a look here to get started with CodeStar.

Features of AWS CodeStar

Now I am sure, you got an overall idea of what code star is and why should you use it at all.

Let’s get into a bit more detail and have a look at some of the prominent features provided by CodeStar.

• With AWS CodeStar you can quickly develop, build and deploy applications on the AWS cloud.
• CodeStar provides many pre-built templates that you can choose to get started with your project in your favourite language.
• You can use a cloud-based IDE cloud 9 to edit and make changes to your code.
• You can use Eclipse or Microsoft Visual Studio as well with the CodeStar. All you need is an AWS tool kit for your respective IDE and you should be good to go.
• With CodeStar you can monitor your application development activities through a one-stop dashboard.
• You can add project extensions like JIRA for issue tracking so that team would be better informed on what should be done next.

Types of applications that you can develop with CodeStar.

• Web application
• Web service
• Alexa Skill
• Static Website
• AWS Config Rule

And you can deploy your application into-

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon EC2
• AWS Lambda

Moreover, you may use AWS CLI to create custom projects for instance – deploy a docker container into ECS.

I created a custom toolchain and sample code to create, build and deploy my docker container into ECS. It made my life easier to develop build and deploy docker containers into ECS.

Language Supported by CodeStar

CodeStar does support popular programming languages such as-

• C#
• Go
• HTML 5
• Java
• Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

CodeStar Limitations:

• Maximum of 333 projects in your AWS account
• maximum 10 projects per IAM
• A maximum of 100 members can belong to a single Codestar project
• Project IDs must be unique in an AWS account

Conclusion

In conclusion, CodeStar can be your saviour when you are new to the AWS environment and, you need to develop, build and deploy applications to the AWS cloud quickly and easily.

You can manage access to your project for your team as per their role. You can monitor all the application activities like recent code commits or deployment etc in the central dashboard.

There are many reasons to love CodeStar. Above all, I really liked how it walks you through creating a project, making the entire process very simple and straightforward.

However, I wish AWS comes up with more customization in future.

Well, That was my take on AWS CodeStar. Do let me know If you have used it. If yes- What is your thought on CodeStar?

Would you like me to come up with a hands on post on getting started with CodeStar step by step? Do let me know in comments and I would to happy to do that for you.

Enjoyed the content?

Subscribe to our newsletter below to get awesome AWS learning materials delivered straight to your inbox.

If you liked reading my post, you can motivate me by-

• Adding a comment below on what you liked and what can be improved.
• Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram
• Share this post with your friends and colleagues

Also Read:

• Basics Of Cyber Security for Beginners
• Create DynamoDB Table Using CloudFormation
• Things You Should Know about AWS SQS Dead Letter Queue
• Hello and Welcome to CloudKatha(First Post)
• Getting Started With Terraform on AWS