During the annual AWS re:Invent developer conference, the public cloud provider announced the public preview of AWS Proton, a new fully-managed deployment service for container and serverless applications. With AWS Proton, customers can automate and manage infrastructure provisioning and code deployments for serverless and container-based applications.
AWS's intention with the Proton service release is to provide customers a one-stop-shop for managing their CodeDeploy, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS), and CloudFormation and Lambda assets - providing a single place to monitor the state of their infrastructure and roll out updates to their code. With the service, a platform team responsible for the AWS infrastructure can allow developer teams to deploy their code using containers and serverless technologies, using the management tools, governance, and visibility needed to provide consistent standards and best practices.
Alex Casalboni, a developer advocate at AWS, explains in an AWS news blog post how Proton works:
The process of defining a service template involves the definition of cloud resources, continuous integration, 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.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/proton/
Through the AWS management console, infrastructure teams can visualize and manage the list of service templates. Furthermore, once service templates have been defined, developers can select and deploy services in a self-service fashion.
A respondent on a Hacker News thread about AWS Proton wrote:
Overall, Proton seems to occupy a similar space as Service Catalog (admin-curated CloudFormation stack templates for self-service deployment by developers), but it provides a more managed, opinionated workflow with a shared Environment stack and separates CI/CD pipeline stack for each service. It seems like an interesting attempt to standardize a bunch of these elements that go into a common use-case of CloudFormation-managed CI/CD pipelines for self-service application development.
Also, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Container-based and serverless technologies have grown at a breathtaking pace in the last years. As a result, some growing pains are supposed to be addressed - one of the main challenges is to manage container images and keep track of their deployments. When changes to container images happen, enterprises need to know where and when to deploy them - this is what AWS Proton is meant to do for container and serverless workloads on AWS.
Currently, AWS Proton is available in a few AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland) - and customers can use the service free of charge and only pay for the underlying services and resources. Furthermore, details of the service are available on the document landing page.