At re:Invent 2022, as usualy, different new AWS Services or functionalities have been announced in Preview. Now, at the beginning of April 2023, a few of them have already reached the “General Availability” (GA) status – Application Composer (in early march), Latice (in late march). My favourite new service, Amazon CodeCatalyst, has not yet reached this goal – but I have a feeling that now is the right time to think about what and when we can expect this status.
You wonder what CodeCatalyst is? Watch this video on my YouTube channel or read my two initial posts about it.
Why is reaching the “GA” milestone so important?
Before starting with my assumptions on what we can expect for GA, lets clarify why reaching this milestone is so important. Being “in Preview” can mean a lot of different things. In a lot of organizations this usually translate to “limited availability”, a service not being available in all regions or not being reliable or scalable. For other organizations, it means that specific aspects of the product can be immature or not reliable. It can also mean that bigger API change are yet to be implemented or missing security guardrails.
In general, this can be seen as a “beta” offering which is not appropiate to use for productive workloads.
Because of these reasons and maybe others, a lot of organizations (especially US based) do not allow using or adapting services that are in “Preview”.
For all of my experiences, tests, videos and projects I was so far able to only be on the free tier. And I assume that this will also be the truth for most of my readers: You can get a long way using the Free Tier that Amazon CodeCatalyst offers today.
So thats another big reason for AWS to push this service out of “Preview”: It gives organizations that are forbidden to use the service in “Preview” the possibility to start using and adopting the service – and with that Amazon can start earning money with the service which unil now might be difficult.
And as we know, AWS tries to “work backwards” from client requirements and the early usage of CodeCatalyst will drive further investments into the service.
What to expect for GA of CodeCatalyst?
Simple: Nothing big – most probably only regional rollout.
I do personally not expect any major new features for the service as the team has been constantely releasing new features and functionalities to the service on a regular cadance. There was simply not more time to work on bigger features while preparing the “General Availability” (GA).
What the CodeCatalyst already has delivered until today…
Let’s look at what has been added to CodeCatalyst since its official release in december 2022:
- Additional Reporting auto-discovery
- Change Tracking – the possibility to see which changes have been deployed to a certain environment
- Additional Workflow native actions and improvements, E.g.
- a problem with the CDK action to be able to define the “workpath” of a CDK app
- Additional native actions
- Linked issues to Pull Requests – you are now able to link issues to a pull request
- UX improvements
- Log files wider accessible in UI – at the beginning you where not able to make the log view larger, now this is possible
- Page title adjustments
- New Blue Prints (like the “Textract” one)
- Development environments for Github based projects
This is not a complete list, but the things that I personally noticed and that I liked to see.
So…when is “the date”?
Hard to guess, but I would expect “soon”. Ideally right before a month starts, which will make the billing cycle easier 
So I would guess “end of april” which would bring the service right in time for the Berlin Summit (3rd of May).
Next steps for CodeCatalyst
In my last posts I have already been communicating my thoughts and features that I would love to see. But what will AWS implement?
Given reaching the “GA” status opens the way to “enterprise clients” I would expect that one of the first features will be Single-Sign-On functionalities, maybe with an integration to Okta, Ping, Azure Active Directory or other already existing IdPs.
In addition to that I believe that the User Interface needs to get some tweaks to streamline the navigation and workflow – that’s something that I personally experience every day: not knowing when and where to click to get on the rigth place. Also I think that additional service integrations will be added – e.g. StepFunctions or SNS, maybe SQS – see also my post about sending notifications from workflows.
And then there is one last thing which has been getting only limited attention so far: APIs and CLI integrations that can be used – so I would expect a major update there.
I’m really looking forward to see CodeCatalyst reaching GA – I’ve had various conversations with the team in the last months and I know that they have a true vision to make CodeCatalyst successfull as a trully AWS integrated and fully functional DevOps tool.
Are there features you are missing? Please let me know and I will forward them to the team.
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