I'm excited to see Amazon entering this space since I think far too much time is spent on setting up and managing devops tools, especially for small and medium-sized projects. [0] I've personally wasted lots of time on repetitively setting up CI/CD, autoscaling, and other basic infrastructure for different companies and projects. Anything Amazon can do to reclaim that time (and encourage more people to adopt best practices) is awesome.
That being said, after poking around I have a few criticisms:
1. It doesn't seem like the example templates include Docker. At this point, I think Docker should be considered a must-have for any new ops tool. It makes your application much more portable and eases the learning curve for new developers.
2. Getting things set up and working is still too complex. It took me 20 minutes to get my first project working fully (even just using their standard tools).
3. There doesn't seem to be any ability to bring in an existing project. It'd be awesome if I could just provide a GitHub URL and Amazon would automatically set up all the ops tools I need to have a production-ready deployment of that project.
I welcome the competition though. Let humans focus on unique work while computers automate things.
That being said, after poking around I have a few criticisms:
1. It doesn't seem like the example templates include Docker. At this point, I think Docker should be considered a must-have for any new ops tool. It makes your application much more portable and eases the learning curve for new developers.
2. Getting things set up and working is still too complex. It took me 20 minutes to get my first project working fully (even just using their standard tools).
3. There doesn't seem to be any ability to bring in an existing project. It'd be awesome if I could just provide a GitHub URL and Amazon would automatically set up all the ops tools I need to have a production-ready deployment of that project.
I welcome the competition though. Let humans focus on unique work while computers automate things.
[0] In fact, I founded my startup on that premise: http://getgandalf.com/