Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of AWS Proton, an application delivery service that makes it easier for customers to provision, deploy, and monitor the microservices that form the basis of modern container and serverless applications.
With AWS Proton, a customer’s infrastructure team creates standard application stacks defining the architecture, infrastructure resources, CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipeline, and observability tools—and then makes these stacks available to their developers, a release said.
Developers can use AWS Proton’s self-service interface to select an application stack for use with their code. AWS Proton automatically provisions the resources for the selected application stack, deploys the code, and sets up monitoring so developers can begin building serverless and container applications without having to learn, configure, or maintain the underlying resources, the company said.
There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS Proton, and customers pay only for the AWS services used to create, scale, and run their applications.
Container and serverless applications improve an organisation’s agility and reduce their operational burden; however, they also change the way customers deploy and manage their code.
Today, when developers build traditional applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the applications are often built as a single block of code, and there are well-established tools that help them develop and deploy their code—like AWS CloudFormation templates (to provision the infrastructure), AWS CodePipeline (to set up the CI/CD process), and Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor the deployments).
Once customers get an application up and running on Amazon EC2, the components of the application typically don’t change very much. For these applications, the code is usually maintained in a single release, so keeping it coordinated is relatively easy, the release added.
By contrast, container and serverless applications are assembled from multiple smaller chunks of code (microservices), which are often developed and maintained independently and then stitched together to build and scale an application.
Each microservice has its own separate infrastructure, code templates, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring that must be updated and maintained. Often, these microservices are developed and operated by different teams, so those teams have the freedom to update the components at their own pace. This results in changes happening more frequently than with traditional applications.
AWS Proton is an application delivery service that helps platform teams provide an easy way for their developers to provision, deploy, and monitor applications when the unit of compute is dynamic, like with containers and serverless.
AWS Proton allows customers to define application components as a stack, which creates everything needed to provision, deploy, and monitor an application, including compute, networking, code pipeline, security, and monitoring.
AWS Proton includes curated application stacks with built-in AWS best practices (for security, architecture, and tools), so infrastructure teams can quickly and easily distribute trusted stacks to their development teams. A customer’s central infrastructure team can easily create and publish a stack to the AWS Proton console.
“Customers have told us that while they love the operational benefits that container and serverless applications provide, it is incredibly challenging to scale these architectures across their organisations because of the many manual tasks involved in deploying apps that use microservices,” said AWS VP, Compute Services Deepak Singh.
“AWS Proton brings together customers’ infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipeline, and observability into a single interface, so developers can quickly go from code in a repo to a production application,” he added.
AWS Proton is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with additional region availability coming soon.
