Simplify application configuration with AWS AppConfig

Posted on: Nov 25, 2019

Today, AWS announces AppConfig, a new capability within AWS Systems Manager that makes it easy for customers to quickly roll out application configurations across applications hosted on EC2 instances, containers, Lambdas, mobile apps, IoT devices, and on-premise servers in a validated, controlled and monitored way. System administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers now have the ability to manage configuration changes, similar to the way they manage code, but without the need for deploying code or taking their application out of service when a configuration value changes, thus mitigating risk of potential outages.

AWS AppConfig provides you with the ability to validate application’s configuration data against a schema or Lambda function that will run against the configuration. Adding this validation logic to your application configurations helps ensure your configuration data is syntactically and semantically correct before making it available to your application. This validation helps ensure that the configuration being deployed meets expected results. The deployment proceeds only if the validation is successful.  

AWS AppConfig also supports best practices by rolling out configuration changes over a defined time period while monitoring the application to catch any errors and rollback the changes if in case any errors occur, to minimize the impact to the users. 

During configuration deployment, AWS AppConfig monitors the application to ensure that the rollout is successful. This is especially useful if you want introduce changes to your application that can only be tested with production traffic and for customers who want to release new products or features. Customers can also use AWS AppConfig to reduce stress on their application when a dependency or other external factor is impacting their system. 

AWS AppConfig allows you to store and manage your configuration content either as Systems Manager Parameters, for configuration values such as URLs, certificates, accounts, and names, or Systems Manager Documents for more robust, typed configuration data in structured formats such as JSON or YAML.  

With this launch, AWS AppConfig is available in US East (Ohio) (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm) and South America (São Paulo).  

This feature is priced on a pay-per-use model. See the AWS AppConfig Pricing page for details.  

To get started, select AWS AppConfig on the AWS Console. To learn more about AWS AppConfig, visit the AWS AppConfig Documentation and AWS News Blog