AWS launches CodeBuild for unit testing and X-Ray for debugging

At its re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas today, public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of a new service called CodeBuild, which is meant to automatically compile developers’ code and then run unit tests on it.

AWS will charge by the minute and automatically scale it in and out based on the needs of the workload, said Amazon vice president and chief technology officer Werner Vogels.

The service can also be customized. If developers work in less popular languages, they can build a Docker image, point the CodeBuild service at it, and the service will automatically run that as well, Vogels said.

The tool fits in with AWS’ other tools for storing and then building and deploying code: CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy. Considered together, this can represent a fuller distribution chain for getting solid code out the door and updating it as needed. Much of this has been done in other tools, but now AWS is basically making it easier for developers to rely more exclusively on its cloud-based services, as Google and Microsoft have done with things like Cloud Source Code Repositories and Visual Studio Team Services, respectively.

AWS is also introducing a service called X-Ray, which is meant to help developers with debugging their code. The service will show performance bottlenecks and show which services are causing issues. It will also show the “impact of issues for users,” Vogels said. The service is available now in preview from all of AWS’ data center regions, according to a blog post today from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr.

Other big public clouds have their own first-party monitoring tools; for instance, Microsoft Azure has Application Insights, and Google Cloud Platform has Stackdriver Trace.

CodeBuild, meanwhile, is available now but only for Linux; Windows support is coming later, Barr wrote in a blog post.

Additionally, Vogels introduced an enhancement to its OpsWorks devops service: AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate. It’s a fully managed version of a Chef server for automating the management of infrastructure.

Update at 1:27 p.m. Pacific: Added information about other clouds’ services.