AWS Proton FAQs

AWS Proton enables platform teams to connect and coordinate all the different tools your development teams need for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. Because the infrastructure is in your account, you have full capacity to manage, update, and troubleshoot as required. This gives you complete flexibility to operate your infrastructure as you choose. Developers can use the AWS Proton self-service interface to deploy their applications with minimal configuration.

AWS Proton enables platform teams to define their infrastructure and deployment tools, while providing developers with a self-service experience to get infrastructure and deploy code. Through AWS Proton, platform teams provision shared resources and define application stacks, including continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and observability tools. You can then manage which infrastructure and deployment features are available for developers. Proton provides visibility over your infrastructure and the capacity to make centralized changes on an ongoing basis.

For organizations using Proton, application developers can self-serve from infrastructure templates to provision the infrastructure they need for their application code. Through AWS Proton, application developers can select Service templates that meet their needs, and easily trigger deployment through a supported CI/CD pipeline without having to write Infrastructure as Code templates. With Proton components, application developers can also customize templates to meet specific application needs.

You can use AWS Proton to manage and coordinate any element that can be provisioned and described with existing infrastructure-as-code tools, including AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and AWS Cloud Development Kit.

AWS Proton is a deployment workflow tool for modern applications. It can be used to manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates build using tools like CloudFormation or Terraform. By comparison, Service Catalog is a catalog of AWS resources that enables customers to store, share, and govern Infrastructure-as-code templates and create individual stacks, for example for specific building blocks like an S3 bucket product. Some AWS customers have used AWS Proton to manage architectures that include Service Catalog product components.

AWS Proton is supported in the following AWS Regions and customers can create Proton resources in accounts running in these Regions. At this time, customers cannot use templates in one region to deploy infrastructure to a second, different region:

US East (Ohio)
us-east-2

US East (N. Virginia)
us-east-1

US West (Oregon)
us-west-2

Canada (Central)
ca-central-1

EU (Frankfurt)
eu-central-1

EU (Ireland)
eu-west-1

EU (London)
eu-west-2

Asia Pacific (Sydney)
ap-southeast-2

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
ap-northeast-1

Asia Pacific (Seoul)
ap-northeast-2

Asia Pacific (Singapore)
ap-southeast-1

Start by signing in to your AWS account. To start defining your infrastructure, go to the AWS Proton console, explore the process to upload your Infrastructure as Code template, and register an application stack. This includes templates for environments, which are shared resources, and services, which are resources specific to a given application. Typically, a platform engineer will manage the creation of templates for environments and services, and then trigger environment deployment. They can also use the ‘bring your own environment’ feature to onboard an existing environment to Proton. Then, developers can use service templates to deploy infrastructure. They select an application stack from the list, enter the required parameters, and deploy.

Platform teams use AWS Proton to create a “stack” presented as a reusable version-controlled template to developers. These stacks are defined using infrastructure as code in a simple, declarative style with everything needed to provision, deploy, and manage a service including compute, networking, code pipeline, security, and monitoring. AWS Proton makes it easy for platform teams to identify and update out-of-date infrastructure when templates are updated.

AWS Proton includes a collection of open-source templates you can use as a starting point to define your architecture with infrastructure as code tools. You can also get started by taking an existing infrastructure as code file, and updating it to define input parameters that AWS Proton will combine with input values when resources are provisioned. When you define a new template, you can save it in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and register it in AWS Proton. AWS Proton reads the template from the bucket and registers it in the console, from where you can test the bucket, publish it to developers, and update it as needed.

Developers can use AWS Proton as a self-service interface to provision infrastructure and deploy their projects without interacting with the underlying resources. AWS Proton provides visibility into the general status of your application, including stacks in use and stack health status. You have access to the CI/CD pipeline, observability tools, and source control for each one.

Sign in to the AWS Proton console to see which application templates your platform team has made available. Enter the configuration parameters for your service, and AWS Proton provisions the infrastructure for you using shared resources that are defined by your platform team. For more information, please visit the AWS Proton Getting Started page.