I admit, it wasn't the easiest thing to setup. But its nice. When I commit my changes to my mainline, it deploys the code to the host and configures everything for me, and keeps all my hosts up to date.

Coworker uses it all to kick off lambda functions.

CodeCommit is just a basic Git setup, so nothing special. But working with CodeDeploy and Pipelines is ok. I wouldn't say its much better or worst than other products, and you can use them to deploy to non-aws environments also.

I don't know, I can't really sell it well. It does what it does, and it works well enough for me.

Is this because the further they move up the stack, the more UX matters? That's Amazon's perennial weakness.

Remember that Bezos says, "Your margins are our opportunity." They will get around to gobbling your market, unless it requires something that doesn't scale for them.

AWS's strategy is not looking for the one true workflow, its to envelop enough common usecases that it dominates nearly the whole field, giving you as custom a service as you want.

I call it the "Atlassian strategy": be mediocre at enough things that you become enormously successful.

It's a long way from a death knell to competitors though.

AWS needs these to prevent other players encroach their ecosystem. The higher the upper-stack offerings in the tech stack, the lower the quality is requires to be dominant. But the ecosystem will secure the customers.

It's not that you cannot beat AWS in one or two offerings, but you cannot beat them as an ecosystem.

Very true! If you only offer one piece, then you have to

1. integrate with them and other providers

And

2. Be substantially better (2x, 5x?) in order to beat the default provided by AWS

And

3. Don't forget you are competing with open source options as well (where the cost is the time to set up a solution, but no cash outlay)

As is, I wouldn't use it without an extreme organizational requirement.