Recently, AWS announced the general availability (GA) of its fully-managed application delivery service, AWS Proton, allowing customers to easily provision, deploy, and monitor the microservices that form the basis of modern container and serverless applications.
The company introduced the service last year at re:Invent as a one-stop shop for customers to allow them to manage their CodeDeploy, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS), and CloudFormation and Lambda assets. In addition, AWS Proton provides customers with a single place to monitor the state of their infrastructure and roll out updates to their code.
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.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/proton/
With the GA release, AWS introduces two new features. First, the service now supports multi-account infrastructures, allowing platform operators to securely use AWS Proton to configure and manage their architecture across multiple AWS accounts. Secondly, it also supports IAM condition context keys in AWS Proton APIs, providing an additional layer of control – operators can designate which developers can create services based on template characteristics.
In an AWS Press Release on the GA release of AWS Proton, Deepak Singh, VP, compute services at AWS, said:
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. Developers rely on AWS Proton's self-service capabilities to deploy code quickly and securely without having to become experts on each of the underlying services involved, while the central infrastructure team can be assured that the apps deployed by their developers using AWS Proton meet the standards they have set for their business.
On the other hand, a respondent in a Reddit thread about the GA of AWS Proton stated:
If you're scratching your head over what Proton is for, the best explanation I've read is that it is aimed at companies with a single centralized IaC/platform team. If you have multiple developer teams that do their own infra, this probably isn't for you.
Furthermore, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
There are tremendous benefits from enterprises moving from containers to serverless - but getting there is not easy. So it is good to see AWS making the creation of container-based next-generation applications easier with Proton, which also helps implement serverless architectures.
And also, Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon.com, wrote in a blog post:
The goal of AWS Proton is simple: customers should be able to adopt, customize and evolve best practices and technologies for delivering their modern applications to the cloud, and not worry about how they roll this out – potentially to thousands of developers – across their organization. Experts need to be able to select the best cloud resources, deployment tools, and delivery mechanisms for the business, with the confidence that they will be adopted within the organization efficiently and without slowing down developers.
Currently, AWS Proton is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, with additional region availability coming soon. Furthermore, there is no additional charge for the service – customers only pay for AWS resources they create to store and run their application. Lastly, details of the service are available on the document landing page.