AWS’ sponsorship of the Rust project

We’re really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language! Rust is designed for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. It has seen considerable uptake since its first stable release four years ago, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all using Rust. Rust has also seen lots of growth in AWS, with services such as Lambda, EC2, and S3 all choosing to use Rust in performance-sensitive components. We’ve even open sourced the Firecracker microVM project!

Why Rust?

In the words of the Rust project’s maintainers:

• Performance. Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.
• Reliability. Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — and enable you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.
• Productivity. Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more.

With its inclusive community and top-notch libraries like:

• Serde, for serializing and deserializing data.
• Rayon, for writing parallel & data race-free code.
• Tokio/async-std, for writing non-blocking, low-latency network services.
• tracing, for instrumenting Rust programs to collect structured, event-based diagnostic information.

…it’ll come as no surprise that Rust was voted Stack Overflow’s “Most Loved Language” four years running.

That’s why AWS is sponsoring the Rust project. The Rust project uses AWS services to:

• Store release artifacts such as compilers, libraries, tools, and source code on S3.
• Run ecosystem-wide regression tests with Crater on EC2.
• Operate docs.rs, a website that hosts documentation for all packages published to the central crates.io package registry.

Getting started with Rust

To get started with the Rust programming language, check out Rust’s “Getting Started” page. To get started with Rust on AWS, consider using Rusoto, a community-driven AWS SDK. To use Rust on AWS Lambda, consider using the official AWS Lambda Runtime for Rust.

While we’re using Rust, we’re especially excited to see how it develops and what the broader community builds with Rust. We can’t wait to be an even bigger part of the Rust community.

ps – AWS credits are available for other open source projects!