CodeCommitment Issues
CodeCommit is an AWS service I have been wanting to explore for quite some time, and one of the things that came out of that research was the title of this post. 💍
What is CodeCommit?
CodeCommit is a part of the developer focused offerings AWS has and for my recent imaginate day, I got to play around with this service. Below I have some thoughts on my experience with it, and how you can use it too!
My Hopes & Dreams
I wanted to explore whether or not it would be worth it for Custom Ink to move from GitHub to CodeCommit, the quick answer is no, but that’s not to say it won’t be right for us in the future.
Let’s start with a few pros on the service…
Pluses:
➕ Permissions are integrated with IAM, so you can control who has permissions to sync to repos, etc. etc.
➕ Charged for storage so it encourages cleanup of stale branches.
➕ Cruft can be cleaned up since you're starting from scratch in a new version control platform.
➕ Inline editor is nicer than GitHub’s.
➕ CodeCommit is tied with IAM so once a user is separated, they no longer have access to the codebase.
➕ CodeCommit can be used as a backup!
➕ Git based, so no learning curve.
➕ AWS support tier that Custom Ink has is better than GitHub’s enterprise support in my experience.
The above is just a quick pro list for CodeCommit + Custom Ink. I have to say that when I have submitted a support request in the past with GitHub, it has taken longer than I would have liked and that was disappointing. When I was playing around with CodeCommit, I was able to set up a Lambda function and SNS topic to post when changes were made to the repo I set up, that was a pretty neat feature and allowed me to have better alerting on changes in the repo. Additionally, using CodeCommit as a backup I think is an easy and smart use of the tool, because your code is held outside of whatever service you are using, and you get to learn more about AWS’s ecosystem!
Now onto a few minuses...
Minuses:
➖ Repos are specific to AWS region.
- This is problematic in my opinion if you have DR/multi-region setup.
➖ General UI issues:
- Commit messaging wasn’t obvious to me when pushing up, and I rely on commit messaging pretty heavily to get a quick idea of what change was promoted.
➖ Charged for storage & other miscellaneous Git activities! So if folks don’t delete stale branches that will not be merged, and repos that are no longer used, the costs can add up.
➖ No dashboard/notification screen with a list of the whole org like with our GitHub account.
➖ Initial of permissions/credentials for the git repo.
My biggest pain point was the general UI. It took some time to get used to the display, if you are just starting out and are already in AWS, I would encourage you to look into CodeCommit before looking at other services like GitHub or GitLab. The reason being is that you are already in the AWS system and it makes management of services easier.
In the future, I’d love to continue exploring AWS’s code* services and continue learning more about their ecosystem and exploring if there are better fits for Custom Ink. If you’d like to explore CodeCommit, I definitely encourage you do so! I recommend you sign up for an AWS account, with CodeCommit you do pay for storage, so things won’t fall under free tier, but it helps to play around with it to truly understand the service and prepare you for any sort of developer exams if you’d like to add that on your resume!
Interested in learning more about AWS services?
We’re hiring! Visit us at customink.com/jobs
About the author
Katherine Cisneros is an Operations Engineer at Custom Ink and has been an Inker since March 2015.
