AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Proton

AWS Proton is the first fully managed application delivery service for containers and serverless

CareerBuilder, Grabyo, and Rackspace among customers and partners using AWS Proton

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Proton, an application delivery service that makes it easier for customers to provision, deploy, and monitor the microservices that form the basis of modern container and serverless applications. With AWS Proton, a customer’s infrastructure team creates standard application stacks defining the architecture, infrastructure resources, CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipeline, and observability tools—and then makes these stacks available to their developers. Developers can use AWS Proton’s self-service interface to select an application stack for use with their code. AWS Proton automatically provisions the resources for the selected application stack, deploys the code, and sets up monitoring so developers can begin building serverless and container applications without having to learn, configure, or maintain the underlying resources. There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS Proton, and customers pay only for the AWS services used to create, scale, and run their applications. To get started with AWS Proton, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/proton.

Container and serverless applications improve an organization’s agility and reduce their operational burden; however, they also change the way customers deploy and manage their code. Today, when developers build traditional applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, the applications are often built as a single block of code, and there are well-established tools that help them develop and deploy their code—like AWS CloudFormation templates (to provision the infrastructure), AWS CodePipeline (to set up the CI/CD process), and Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor the deployments). Once customers get an application up and running on Amazon EC2, the components of the application typically don’t change very much. For these applications, the code is usually maintained in a single release, so keeping it coordinated is relatively easy.

By contrast, container and serverless applications are assembled from multiple smaller chunks of code (microservices), which are often developed and maintained independently and then stitched together to build and scale an application. Each microservice has its own separate infrastructure, code templates, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring that must be updated and maintained. Often, these microservices are developed and operated by different teams, so those teams have the freedom to update the components at their own pace. This results in changes happening more frequently than with traditional applications. As customers have increasingly adopted container and serverless applications, they have found that managing hundreds, or even thousands, of microservices with constantly changing and disparate infrastructure resources, code deployments, and monitoring tools can be a challenging task for even the most capable teams. Customers lack an integrated solution that ties together all the tasks, including resource provisioning, code deployments, and monitoring. Central infrastructure teams try to provide guidance to their developers, and some have even built their own custom tools to help developers implement best practices. However, for many organizations, the intricacies of coordinating the development and deployment of container and serverless applications can negatively impact quality and security, and can slow down application development and container and serverless adoption.

AWS Proton is an application delivery service that helps platform teams provide an easy way for their developers to provision, deploy, and monitor applications when the unit of compute is dynamic, like with containers and serverless. AWS Proton allows customers to define application components as a stack, which creates everything needed to provision, deploy, and monitor an application, including compute, networking, code pipeline, security, and monitoring. AWS Proton includes curated application stacks with built-in AWS best practices (for security, architecture, and tools), so infrastructure teams can quickly and easily distribute trusted stacks to their development teams. A customer’s central infrastructure team can easily create and publish a stack to the AWS Proton console. The stack defines all of the infrastructure and tooling for the microservice, and provides consistency and standards across the organization. When a developer is ready to deploy their code, they pick the stack that best suits their use case, plug in the parameters for their application, and click deploy. AWS Proton handles everything needed to deploy the application, including provisioning the requested AWS services, pushing code through the CI/CD pipeline, setting up monitoring and alarms, and compiling, testing, and deploying the code. The AWS Proton console lists the microservices that are using each stack, so it is easy for infrastructure teams to make sure all microservices are updated as needed. With AWS Proton, infrastructure teams can also easily manage their container and serverless deployments and focus on creating great applications—instead of spending hours setting up infrastructure for each development team.

“Customers have told us that while they love the operational benefits that container and serverless applications provide, it is incredibly challenging to scale these architectures across their organizations because of the many manual tasks involved in deploying apps that use microservices,” said Deepak Singh, VP, Compute Services, AWS. “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.”

AWS Proton is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with additional region availability coming soon.

CareerBuilder has fulfilled its mission to empower employment by helping millions of people find jobs over the past 20 years. An industry leader in end-to-end human capital solutions, CareerBuilder leverages cutting-edge software and technology to help companies find, hire, and manage great talent. “When we were faced with a developer productivity bottleneck, we needed to find a solution, and quickly. We needed the development teams to focus on shipping products faster,” said Jean-Marc Fontaine, Software Architect Lead, CareerBuilder. “We couldn’t expect them to become overnight experts on managing and operating the infrastructure. It was inefficient and unrealistic. With AWS Proton, we can give them a centralized, self-service interface so they can quickly select templates that are IT-approved and get their applications deployed with minimal configuration.”

Grabyo is a leading cloud-native live video production platform for broadcast, digital, and over-the-top (OTT)/ Internet-based content. "Our engineering teams work hard and fast to develop a constant stream of features and enhancements to our platform. As teams build and grow new services, the sprawl of infrastructure management becomes troublesome to test, manage, and handle version changes on," said Max Turck, Lead DevSecOps Engineer, Grabyo. "We're excited for AWS Proton to enable our platform teams to better govern the architecture that hosts our services, and adhere to the latest security, scalability, and operational excellences, while providing product teams the flexibility to request entire environments in an instant."

copebit AG is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner based in Switzerland. A born-in-the-cloud company, copebit leverages AWS technologies to help their clients and grow their own business. “Our software development team uses agile development methods to produce software and features rapidly,” said Marco Kuendig, Managing Partner, copebit. “To facilitate that we have templatized the whole CI/CD building and execution environment on AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda with AWS Proton. copebit developers just need to pick one of the provided AWS Proton templates, and within minutes they can build, test, deploy, and execute a microservice. That improves the standardization and shifts power and responsibility to our developers in true DevSecOps style.”

Rackspace Technology is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that helps companies design and build scalable solutions for the future. “As part of Rackspace Technology's mission to help customers innovate in the cloud, we're often helping them find the balance between standardization and experimentation,” said Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT, Rackspace. “We're excited about AWS Proton, which provides a cloud-native way for administrative teams to define infrastructure and service standards without removing the self-service AWS access that enables developer innovation. We're looking forward to leveraging AWS Proton as another tool to help our joint customers on their cloud journey.”

Altoros has built its business migrating customers to the cloud. “A challenge we see customers facing is the static nature of the solutions they engineer. AWS Proton offers our joint customers an abstraction layer to expose the options development teams need and central management tools. AWS Proton provides a way to get the security and governance benefits of a repeatable abstraction without turning over the keys to an account,” said Tony Hansmann, CTO, Cloud Orchestration, Altoros. “We work with customers to deliver infrastructure-as-code, which is a great set of practices, however, as the cloud team becomes successful they become oversubscribed and hit their scaling limit. Because of AWS Proton’s reusability, templatization, and, above all, meaningful versioning, we can now offer a way past that bottleneck.”

ClearScale is a cloud professional services company that leverages deep technical expertise to build tailored cloud solutions for each client. “With the new AWS Proton service, organizations finally have a centralized way to manage container and serverless deployments. This fully customized, self-service platform helps development teams focus on their code and easily roll out updates as needed,” said Pavel Vasilyev, VP of Technology, ClearScale. “Our customers will benefit from AWS Proton’s ability to increase the productivity of developers and enforce best practices and consistent standards for deploying new code. We’re very excited about the opportunity to support AWS Proton.”

nClouds is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that collaborates with their customers to build and manage modern infrastructure solutions that deliver innovation faster. “As we migrate more workloads to microservices, we’re providing ways to help customers manage the growing complexity of their infrastructure,” said JT Giri, CEO & Co-founder, nClouds. “We are excited to leverage AWS Proton to help customers enforce best practices and increase developer productivity in their modern operations.”

2nd Watch provides best-in-class professional services and managed cloud services to enable enterprise clients to transform and evolve their businesses through cloud native capabilities. “AWS Proton is a first stop for organizations evaluating how to implement a modern, robust, self-service framework underpinning a modern cloud operations approach,” said Chris Garvey, EVP, Cloud Services, 2nd Watch. “AWS Proton supports the centralized infrastructure team’s mission of ensuring proper standardization, optimization, and best practices, while enabling development teams to deploy application code efficiently across different infrastructure services and environments. We are excited to support AWS Proton as part of our Modern Cloud Enablement offering that assists clients on their path towards modernization.”

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