They tried to do a LOT. An absolutely huge amount of work trying to abstract all of the existing Code* services, big chunks of other AWS services, and then corp (and non corp!) identity. The last part, getting human identity in to AWS, is such a fundamental gap. In the end its unsurprising that they couldnt get to a competitive place against gitlab/github/etc. I do hope theres more success with identity center picking up some of those IdP pieces.

In my experience, any time AWS tries to create a service outside of the primitives, it’s a mess.

I'm guessing it's just harder to dogfood in a way that others can use without all of the other internal-only infra (including dev tooling) available internally. And to get to the point where you could dogfood at AWS scale, anything that's difficult to adopt incrementally is going to be a pain.

Exactly, no one internally is going to use something like Amplify or Code Catalyst. That’s like internal developers didn’t use CodeCommit (AWS’s now deprecated Git service).

Even though it did hurt me when they got rid of CodeCommit. I work in consulting and I always ask for my own isolated dev AWS account in their organization with basically admin access. It was nice to just be able to put everything in CodeCommit without dealing with trying to be a part of their GitHub organization if their was red tape.

I miss Cloud 9 too. I didn’t have to bother with making sure their computers were setup with all of the pre requisites and it gave me a known environment for the handover