Amazon's new cloud service uses templates to simplify provisioning, security management, continuous delivery Credit: Thinkstock Amazon looks to simplify building and deploying apps on its cloud platform with the introduction of the AWS CodeStar service this week. The cloud service eases project setup by using templates for web applications, web services, and other projects on common development platforms. Developers can provision projects and resources for software development processes ranging from coding to testing and deployment. Templates are featured for such AWS options as EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, and Lambda, and supported languages include JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP. AWS CodeStar was launched in response to organizations facing the challenge of having agile, dynamic software development processes, said AWS Technical Evangelist Tara Walker. “The first challenge most new software projects face is the lengthy setup process that developers have to complete before they can start coding,” she said. This process could include setting up IDEs, accessing code repositories, and identifying infrastructure needed for builds, tests, and production. Other features in CodeStar include unified security policies management, an automated continuous delivery pipeline, a preconfigured project management dashboard, and integration with the Atlassian Jira issue management platform. Project activity like recent code commits and changes, as well as build results can be monitored. Users are not charged extra for CodeStar; they pay only for the AWS resources already provisioned. Software DevelopmentCloud Computing