It's 9:00 do you know where your code is?
If you write code, it can keep you up at night worrying about how it's performing, where the next bug is coming from, and who's plotting to maliciously hacking it. And that's just in production. Before it even gets to that point you have to be concerned with regression errors, consistency among team members, branching, merging, and on and on. So how do you ever get to the point where you're comfortable and can sleep easy?
It starts with a solid source code management solution. Fortunately, Amazon offers a very robust solution with AWS Code Commit.
Code Commit is built off of the git source code management platform. This means that all of the features of git that you are familiar with are available in Code Commit along with the security of running on AWS infrastructure.
You will need to establish a procedure for branching and merging with Code Commit for your source control management efforts to be truly effective. If your team is small, 1 – 3 developers, this procedure should be fairly simple.
Developers branch off of the master branch to a feature branch and work there until they are ready to have their changes tested. Then they commit and merge with the master branch.
If everything tests out ok, hooray! On to production.
In a more complex team, a more sophisticated procedure may be called for. In this scenario, developers that are ready to merge their changes create a pull request for a Lieutenant to review and officially merge to the master branch. This keeps code changes from multiple developers from trampling each other and the testing efforts that are underway.
Even in this scenario though, the process isn't overly complex, it just requires discipline to follow it consistently.
Once you've mastered Code Commit, AWS offers additional developer tools Code Build and Code Deploy. If you are interested in exploring those never fear! I've got more information coming soon.
In the mean time, if you want to get familiar with the essentials of AWS, try out my Free AWS Essentials course. It will get you started with the fundamentals of AWS so you can start building your own cloud computing systems in no time.
