Preview: AWS Proton – Automated Management for Container and Serverless Deployments

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of AWS Proton, a new service that helps you automate and manage infrastructure provisioning and code deployments for serverless and container-based applications.

Maintaining hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of microservices with constantly changing infrastructure resources and configurations is a challenging task for even the most capable teams.

AWS Proton enables infrastructure teams to define standard templates centrally and make them available for developers in their organization. This allows infrastructure teams to manage and update infrastructure without impacting developer productivity.

How AWS Proton Works
The process of defining a service template involves the definition of cloud resources, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and observability tools. AWS Proton will integrate with commonly used CI/CD pipelines and observability tools such as CodePipeline and CloudWatch. It also provides curated templates that follow AWS best practices for common use cases such as web services running on AWS Fargate or stream processing apps built on AWS Lambda.

Infrastructure teams can visualize and manage the list of service templates in the AWS Management Console.

This is what the list of templates looks like.

AWS Proton also collects information about the deployment status of the application such as the last date it was successfully deployed. When a template changes, AWS Proton identifies all the existing applications using the old version and allows infrastructure teams to upgrade them to the most recent definition, while monitoring application health during the upgrade so it can be rolled-back in case of issues.

This is what a service template looks like, with its versions and running instances.

Once service templates have been defined, developers can select and deploy services in a self-service fashion. AWS Proton will take care of provisioning cloud resources, deploying the code, and health monitoring, while providing visibility into the status of all the deployed applications and their pipelines.

This way, developers can focus on building and shipping application code for serverless and container-based applications without having to learn, configure, and maintain the underlying resources.

This is what the list of deployed services looks like.

Available in Preview
AWS Proton is now available in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland); it’s free of charge, as you only pay for the underlying services and resources. Check out the technical documentation.

You can get started using the AWS Management Console here.

— Alex