Amazon CodeCatalyst Development Environments

If you are like me, you like to be able to write code anywhere. While I pretty much always have my laptop set up with development tools, I also have a bad habit of not pushing my changes when I get done. I then pull out a different device and get ready to code, only to find out that the latest changes are on the last device I was using, leaving me unable to pick up where I felt off.

Honestly, this frustration has hit me more often than I care to admit... and usually by the time I have managed to track down where the last code updates are, and get them all synched up... the time I have to write code has passed and I have to put my laptop away.

This is one of the reasons that the new Development Environments feature for CodeCatalyst has me excited. Now that I am using CodeCatalyst for my development project, even though the code is stored in GitHub, I can quickly, and easily fire up a development environment that I can connect to from my laptop. CodeCatalyst development Environments hook into your locally running IDE, giving you the best of both worlds; a local editing experience with files stored and edited in a remote location. Currently, there is support for Visual Studio Code, some of the JetBrains IDEs, and the option to use AWS's Cloud9 development environments if you would prefer a web-based IDE experience.

CodeCatalyst's development environments are configured on a per-project basis, which gives you a good deal of flexibility and means that you can install packages to the environment that makes sense for the specific project. I have long been a fan of developing virtual machines for exactly this reason.

Once you have a Project set up in CodeCatalyst, creating a development environment can be set up with a few clicks from inside the project screen. Once you have a development environment set up in CodeCatalyst and have Visual Studio Code installed on your laptop, connecting to that environment is a single click. It doesn't get any easier than that!

By default, your development environment will automatically hibernate after 15 minutes of inactivity. This helps to make sure that you don't burn through the included development environment hours by leaving an environment running.

CodeCatalyst has a generous free tier that provides 60 hours of development environment usage every month. Beyond that CodeCatalyst has a standard tier that provides a larger pool of resources for your projects. See https://codecatalyst.aws/explore/pricing for details on pricing and what is included.

CodeCatalyst is currently still in developer preview, but the feature set is coming along nicely. I'm currently using it to build a pet project for a RaspberryPi. If you are looking for an all-in-one DevOps solution for your new project, give CodeCatalyst a look. Https://codecatalyst.aws