AWS Proton

https://aws.amazon.com/proton/

by jacobwg • 6 years ago

99 71 6 years ago

aws.amazon.com

randtrain34• 6 years ago

Would this work as a substitute for fargate + codedeploy + codepipeline?

snissn• 6 years ago

is this netlify?

gervwyk• 6 years ago

my first thoughts aswel.

hambone4• 6 years ago

Netlify doesn’t support sever-side languages and frameworks, like Node, so not exactly.

yandie2• 6 years ago

Taking a look at the template repo, it seems to be just CloudFormation at the moment: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-proton-sample-templates/t...

I guess I won't be trying this until they support CDK.

For a small number of services, I find code template with Pulumi/CDK a much developer experience, rather than dealing CloudFormation templates directly

bovermyer• 6 years ago

What's CDK?

mcintyre1994• 6 years ago

It's an AWS tool for writing infrastructure as code in a few different languages that compiles to a CloudFormation template.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/home.html

maximeblais• 6 years ago

AWS Cloud Development Kit

https://aws.amazon.com/cdk

koolba• 6 years ago

The FAQ has a bit more information: https://aws.amazon.com/proton/faqs/

And by "a bit" I mean I'm still wondering what exactly this service provides.

Is this high-level management and grouping for CloudFormation templates?

technics256• 6 years ago

It seems to be? Which is a deal breaker for me as I manage everything with terraform

slowmovintarget• 6 years ago

Right, this seems to be a replacement for Terraform, with the caveat that it only works for AWS.

That may be OK if you exclusively run workloads on AWS. If they can get people to switch to it, that would seem to increase the friction of switching to some other provider (i.e. a business win for Amazon).

If you're invested in Terraform already, and have dealt with the headaches of managing that .tfstate file properly, this likely isn't worth looking at... yet. If you're a newbie and haven't really practiced Continuous Delivery before, this is a welcome addition to a gap in Amazon-provided tooling.

But for those of us who've been around the block with AWS... Yeah, we'll keep using Terraform and check back in a couple of years.

anentropic• 6 years ago

This maybe explains a bit better https://docs.aws.amazon.com/proton/latest/userguide/Welcome....

And it seems to be based on CloudFormation templates https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-proton-sample-templates/b...

saberience• 6 years ago

Is this using CloudFormation (shit) or can it be used with Terraform (not shit)?

yandie2• 6 years ago

CF, obviously - it's AWS! It probably will support CDK in the future (underneath is CF template), but I don't see terraform being supported unless AWS acquires the company

gtsteve• 6 years ago

I would imagine that if there's enough demand there won't be very much lead time before it is added to Terraform.

cpufry3• 6 years ago

https://github.com/aws/aws-proton-public-roadmap/issues/1

lambda_obrien3• 6 years ago

I have no clue what this is, like everyone else, but if AWS released a Heroku-like deployment tool that scaled massively and only cost the underlying resources and a small fee, I'd use it immediately for almost all my Dokku projects. I'm waiting for a Heroku-like service from the major providers that abstracts away the deployment work, but isn't going to bust my wallet (Heroku is way too expensive for personal projects).

weddpros• 6 years ago

digital ocean apps may fit the bill?

cpufry3• 6 years ago

i thought aws ligthsail or whatever did that

smt883• 6 years ago

AWS has this. It's called Elastic Beanstalk. There's no "small fee" on top. It just costs the underlying resources.

billycodes• 6 years ago

Just the fee of your time sorting through which services you need and then the docs for those services - assuming of course you chose the correct service(s)

lambda_obrien3• 6 years ago

Can I push to a git repo and have it automatically deploy the code there, like in Dokku, without any work at all?

To be clear, I am looking for a way to click through some setup stuff in a user management console then set some configurations and never have to manage anything again other than pushing to git. I don't even want to setup my own Dokku server, I already do that and while it's not hard, I don't like having to update it and maintain it about once a month.

codes_by_night• 6 years ago

Uffizzi is cutting legs out of Heroku on price. It’s new - some of docs are lacking but great UX and has a cheaper pricing scheme.

hambone4• 6 years ago

Second this

adkadskhj• 6 years ago

Is Heroku that expensive? Uffizzi looks to be $20/m for the smallest tier. Which is significant for small apps imo - am i misunderstanding something? I thought Heroku and DigitalOcean Apps had ~$5/m options with no DB, and something like $10/m for App+DB.

foobiekr• 6 years ago

SalesForce also has been slowly killing Heroku for years (including layoffs recently).

hambone4• 6 years ago

You should checkout Uffizzi.com. It’s built on GCP

hambone4• 6 years ago

Like Heroku, but way less

x3c• 6 years ago

Render.com

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

To be honest, Caprover does this easier than Dokku.

jcims• 6 years ago

This sounds like it's possibly a more comprehensive front-end to Service Catalog, maybe a bit more abstracted from the provisioning b/c it says 'infrastructure as code tools like CloudFormation' where Service Catalog is strictly pinned to CloudFormation. It also seems to include some facility for building the account itself (e.g. logging, vpc endpoints, etc) that today is just generally done with homespun IaC tooling and automation.

Probably useless for smaller organizations, but if you're a central technology team trying to engineer a safe cloud platform for your business units to develop, deploy and operate on, any improvement over what AWS provides to date would be welcome.

ruffrey• 6 years ago

If anyone at AWS is listening, please fix your new pricing tool. I have been using AWS for damn near a decade and miss the old pricing calc terribly. This new tool doesn’t return search results for fargate or proton pricing. I always fumble around and eventually end up on a random blog just to calculate stuff.

marcinzm• 6 years ago

That's one thing I liked about Google Cloud when playing with it. Their notebook environment tells me exactly how much my notebook will cost per month based on the VM settings. AWS (SageMaker Studio) doesn't even tell me what is running in an easy to access way much less future costs.

beoberha2• 6 years ago

Seems like an interesting product that I’m sure a lot of people have a need for. At first I thought it was going to be a Google Cloud Run / Azure Container Instances clone, but seems to be more fully featured like Netlify. Seems ripe for vendor lock in, though.

beoberha2• 6 years ago

Looks like this is the GCR/ACI compete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25267182

jatsign2• 6 years ago

Based on the comments on this thread:

Amazon has a real problem if even the HN audience can't easily figure out what a new service is.

I actually didn't get it either, and came to the comments for help.

oh_sigh3• 6 years ago

Literally the first sentence on the site is "AWS Proton is the first fully managed application deployment service for container and serverless applications. Platform engineering teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates."

That seems fairly clear to me. What am I missing?

shortstuffsushi• 6 years ago

It's fully managed (meaning Amazon maintains it?) application deployment service (so, like CodeDeploy?) for container and serverless (again, CodeDeploy?). It allows you to connect and coordinate (?) all the different tools. I use AWS, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, Terraform, CloudWatch, etc. I don't understand from these two sentences where this falls into this, or if it's somehow meant to sit on top of it, etc. Like the GP, I came to this thread to see an explanation of what this actually means.

jatsign2• 6 years ago

Perhaps it's just confusing to people like me, who don't work on "platform engineering teams". The sentence is just too packed with terms I have no analogy for.

The best analogy I came up with is "It's like kubernetes and jenkins had a baby."

kempbellt3• 6 years ago

Literally nothing in that sentence explains what Proton really does, how people will use it, or what problem it solves.

What "different tools"? What kind of "infrastructure provisioning"? Code deployments from where, and to what? Monitoring of what? Updates to code, to the infrastructure, to tooling, or something else?

Is it an abstraction service that manages CodeDeploy, EKS, and CF underneath? Is it something completely new?

It is very fluffy language that tries to make Proton sound awesome, but explains absolutely nothing about what it actually does without any context.

swirepe• 6 years ago

Platform engineering teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates.

It's a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

splix• 6 years ago

Hm, so, guessing from the description, it's like a new Slack, right? like a chat but for devops people somehow?

zainuahmed• 6 years ago

Reading this I think Proton == Waypoint for AWS services only. Still a lot of work to manage infra and cobble everything together and geared more towards platform teams at larger companies vs. everyday developers and startups.

BhavdeepSethi• 6 years ago

This is the 5th amazon.com link trending on HN. Seems like AWS is releasing bunch of new features today.

sudhirj• 6 years ago

It’s the annual conference, called reinvent.

warent• 6 years ago

Isn't this just CloudFormation?

adamfeldman• 6 years ago

This sounds similar to Azure Blueprints[1]:

"Just as a blueprint allows an engineer or an architect to sketch a project's design parameters, Azure Blueprints enables cloud architects and central information technology groups to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implements and adheres to an organization's standards, patterns, and requirements. Azure Blueprints makes it possible for development teams to rapidly build and stand up new environments with trust they're building within organizational compliance with a set of built-in components, such as networking, to speed up development and delivery."

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/blueprints...

cpufry3• 6 years ago

this is the correct answer

crystaln3• 6 years ago

Yet another meta Amazon Web Service with vaguely overlapping features.

I think managing AWS will be a major application of early almost-general AI, because it is beyond human comprehension.

kabdib• 6 years ago

It seems like we're seeing the outcome of an internal political battle for relevancy.

My first question when I see a product like this is, "Do the people developing the service actually use it themselves?"

crystaln3• 6 years ago

Maybe this is ok, because AWS is so large, competition of technologies is good and probably necessary for long term survival.

Rodeoclash• 6 years ago

On the other hand, not very good if you're using Amazon and one of the technologies you've picked doesn't make the "survival of the fittest".

wgjordan2• 6 years ago

Here are documentation links with more detailed info (hard to find since they were not linked anywhere in the product page or announcement, seems like a rushed release):

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/proton/

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/proton/latest/adminguide/index.h... (Platform Team Administration Guide)

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/proton/latest/userguide/index.ht... (User Guide)

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/proton/latest/APIReference/index... (API Reference)

adamredwoods• 6 years ago

Terraform competitor or complement? I have to admit, the overhead for setting up our AWS is quite a struggle for me, but I also tire of the continuing layers of AWS that could sometimes create a complete waterfall of problems (ahem, Kinesis outage). (EDIT: To clarify, the decision to use AWS for some things or all things.)

https://www.terraform.io/

pgp001• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm not a 'Platform Engineer' but how is this different than Kubernetes?

wgjordan2• 6 years ago

Here's my attempt to summarize what this service actually does, after reading the documentation in more detail:

Proton is an opinionated, 'self-service' application CI/CD workflow built on top of CloudFormation (for now, however it appears intentionally designed for future expansion).

The service defines separate workflows for two distinct teams in an organization, the 'Platform Team' and 'Developers'.

The Platform Team publishes two types of 'Template Bundles' ('Environment' and 'Service') for self-service usage by Developers:

- 'Template bundles' consist of a stack template (CloudFormation yaml that gets passed through a Jinja template filter), a schema file (defining inputs and outputs), and a manifest (metadata specifying the template language [CFn] and rendering engine [Jinja], intended for future expansion).

- 'Environment' templates define the set of shared resources and policies that Services are deployed into (e.g., VPCs, clusters, and shared load balancers or API Gateways);

- 'Service' templates define the AWS resources specific to the service (e.g., Lambda functions, ECS tasks, associated IAM roles, etc), Service bundles also include a separate 'Pipeline' template which defines a separate set of resources (e.g., CodeBuild Projects + CodePipeline Pipelines) used for building/testing/deploying instances of the service.

Developers then consume these template bundles for self-service deployment of CI/CD pipelines for their applications. First they create an Environment from a published Environment template, then create Services (containing one or more Service Instances) in an Environment from published Service templates. When a Developer creates a Service they connect it to their code repository, so new commits trigger the service pipeline to build+deploy the application code.

Finally, the Platform Team maintains its template bundles over time by publishing new minor/major revisions, and Developers manually opt-in to these version updates for their deployed Environments/Services.

The service also provides some curated template bundles (for Lambda and Fargate-based services), which is helpful because there's a ton of boilerplate in wiring up all of these parts together.

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 separate CI/CD pipeline stack for each Service. 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.

RocketSyntax• 6 years ago

AWS needs to start naming things in a more self-explanatory manner. So many services.

peregrintook• 6 years ago

How different is this from ElasticBeanstalk. Both wrap other AWS resources in a template. They both have notions of an application and set of environments. If ElasticBeanstalk did not succeed why will this succeed? Is it because it leverages Docker container/Lambda layers underneath instead of a custom build and packaging pipeline

AWS Proton

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