AWS has announced that Amazon CodeCatalyst is now generally available, Devops Digest reports. CodeCatalyst is a unified software development service that brings together everything teams need to start planning, coding, building, testing, and deploying applications on AWS.
CodeCatalyst is designed to make it easier for developers to spend more time developing application features and less time setting up project tools, creating and managing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, provisioning and configuring different development and deployment environments, and engaging project contributors.
CodeCatalyst aims to empower professional developers to create and deploy applications on AWS. There are four core elements of CodeCatalyst that are designed to help minimize distractions and maximize satisfaction in the software development process.
The four foundational elements of CodeCatalyst:
– Blueprints get you started quickly. CodeCatalyst blueprints set up an application code repository (complete with a working sample app), define cloud infrastructure, and run pre-configured CI/CD workflows for your project. Blueprints bring together the elements that are necessary both to begin a new project and deploy it into production. Blueprints can help to significantly reduce the time it takes to set up a new project. They are built by AWS for many use cases, and you can configure them with the programming languages and frameworks that you need both for your application and the underlying infrastructure-as-code.
– Actions-based CI/CD workflows take the pain out of pipeline management. CI/CD workflows in CodeCatalyst run on flexible, managed infrastructure. When you create a project with a blueprint, it comes with a complete CI/CD pipeline composed of actions from the included actions library. You can modify these pipelines with an action from the library or you can use any GitHub Action directly in the project to edit existing pipelines or build new ones from scratch.
– Automated dev environments make consistency achievable A big friction point for developers collaborating on a software project is getting everyone on the same set of dependencies and settings in their local machines, and ensuring that all other environments from test to staging to production are also consistent. To help address this, CodeCatalyst has Dev Environments that are hosted in the cloud. Dev Environments are defined using the devfile standard, ensuring that everyone working on a project gets a consistent and repeatable experience.
– Issue management and simplified team onboarding streamline collaboration. CodeCatalyst is designed to help provide the benefits of building in a unified software development service by making it easier to onboard and collaborate with teammates. It starts with the process of inviting new collaborators: you can invite people to work together on your project with their email address, bypassing the need for everyone to have an individual AWS account. Once they have access, collaborators can see the history and context of the project and can start contributing by creating a Dev Environment.
CodeCatalyst also has built-in issue management that’s linked to your code repo, so you can assign tasks like code reviews and pull requests to teammates and help track progress using agile methodologies directly in the service. As with the rest of CodeCatalyst, collaboration happens without the distraction of managing separate services with separate logins and different commercial agreements. Once you give a new team member access, they can quickly start contributing.
