AWS CodeDeploy reaches into the data center

Recognizing the growing importance of hybrid clouds, Amazon recently augmented its AWS CodeDeploy service to support on-premises instances.

On-premises support and CodeDeploy's existing capability of automating code deployments to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances means seamless support for hybrid cloud infrastructures.

CodeDeploy, a homegrown Amazon software development tool, provides the ability to track deployment during development, testing and production.

"With the new support in AWS CodeDeploy for on-premises instances, it means Amazon is supporting hybrid clouds without actually saying 'hybrid clouds,'" said Greg Schulz, senior advisory analyst at The StorageIO Group in Stillwater, Minn., and a TechTarget contributor. "Amazon tends to dance around the term 'hybrid' and not use it."

Developers can use CodeDeploy's fleet-coordination capabilities to write and manage code on a company's private servers at a cost of $0.02 per on-premises instance update. There is no charge for code deployments made to Amazon EC2 instances through CodeDeploy.

In a blog post, Amazon said developers already using CodeDeploy to manage their EC2 instances requested the ability to extend that same fleet-coordination feature for the deployment of code to their on-premises instances.

The enhancement is already being embraced by one developer of continuous integration and deployment solutions.

"CodeDeploy, prior to its recent integration with on-premises deployment, was already solving the challenge of automating deployments for EC2 users," said Jay Moorthi, co-founder of Solano Labs, Inc., based in San Francisco. "By extending this capability to on-premises environments, AWS has now enabled deployment to the hybrid cloud environment that we see many large enterprises use today."

The combined on- and off-premises support allows developers to coordinate rolling updates across a collection of EC2 and on-premises instances. Deployment groups are defined by tagging on-premises instances the same as EC2 instances. The state of on-premises instances can be monitored and updated via the CodeDeploy Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

To manage on-premises instances, Amazon, in its blog post, recommends using the AWS CLI to issue the "AWS deploy register" and "AWSdeploy install" commands, followed by updating or creating a CodeDeploy Deployment Group that includes the on-premises instance for a new or existing application.

Joel Shore is news writer for SearchCloudApplications.com and SearchAWS.com. Contact him at [email protected].