I have a little insight on how things like CodeCommit fall behind the competition.

I worked at AWS in the Professional Services division. For a little over two years I was on a makeshift team maintaining and improving a very popular open source project in its niche.

The project was hosted on “AWS Samples” (https://github.com/aws-samples). Once approved for the initial release of a project in this Github organization, there is no oversite on updates. In my experience from releasing 8 of my own projects to the repository, it takes about two days to get the initial approval and it’s really based on the honor system as far as following the guidelines after that.

We released features and improvements like gangbusters based on customer demand or if we just wanted to scratch an itch.

Then, it became popular enough to be promoted from “AWS Samples” to an “AWS Solution” (https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/).

Everything slowed to a crawl, releases, approval processes, you had to justify everything you wanted to add based on revenue potential, everything had to be approved by higher ups. We were the sane developers. I dropped out of the project then.

But I saw the storm coming, so my last major contribution before it got transitioned was to introduce “hooks” functionality that allowed you to change the processing pipeline by adding a custom lambda arn to it in settings.

Before it became a “solution” former AWS employees who use to work on the project who were still in the industry would make changes and submit pull requests that we would merge.

But back to CodeCommit, can you imagine how hard it is to convince senior leadership to give you funding for a service that neither gives you a competitive advantage nor is a revenue generator?

Hell they just added support for viewing images inline in markdown from the console this year.