Amazon Web Services Inc. is making life easier for developers with the general availability of a new service that helps automate the deployment of container-based and serverless software applications in its cloud.

AWS Proton is an application delivery service that enables platform teams quickly and easily to create a stack that defines the infrastructure resources, continuous delivery pipeline and observability tools they want to use, the company said today.

Containers that host the components of modern applications that can run on any computing platform are becoming more popular because they help companies to become more agile. The same goes for serverless, which is a model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers. There are still servers in serverless, but they are abstracted away from app development.

Container-based and serverless apps add complexity in new ways, though. The problem is they’re built using dozens of components, or microservices, each of which has its own infrastructure, code templates, continuous integration and deployment or CI/CD pipelines, and observability that needs to be updated and maintained separately, often by separate teams.

All that means changes occur more often than with traditional applications. The task of monitoring all of these microservices, with their frequently changing and disparate infrastructure resources and code deployments, can quickly become a burden for developers.

AWS Proton tries to ease that burden by giving developers a way to define their application components as a stack that includes compute, networking, code pipelines, security and monitoring. The curated application stacks are built according to Amazon’s best practices for security, architecture and tools, so all developers need to do is set the parameters for their apps and click “deploy” and they’re done.

AWS Proton then takes care of provisioning the necessary infrastructure and services, pushes code through the CI/CD pipeline, then compiles, tests and deploys it into action. From the AWS Proton console teams can see a list of microservices using the stack to check that they’re all up to date.

AWS Vice President of Compute Services Deepak Singh told SiliconANGLE during a December interview on theCUBE that AWS Proton can be thought of as a self-service framework where developers just come and choose the basic elements of their container or serverless apps.

“The biggest benefit to developers is they don’t have to become an expert in every single technology out there,” Singh said. “They can focus on writing application code.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that AWS Proton looks like it will be fairly useful to enterprises that an easier time managing their microservices. “As promising as microservices are, they are difficult to manage, operate and monitor,” he said. So AWS Proton should help enterprises. But delivering this service is only half the journey, adoption is even more critical so it will be key to see how well customers embrace this.”

At least, customers don’t have much to lose by giving it a whirl. AWS Proton is entirely free, with customers only billed for the AWS services that are used to create and run their applications, Amazon said.

The company said AWS Proton is generally available now in its US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, with more to come soon.

Here’s more from Singh on AWS Proton and the wider trend of serverless application development on Amazon’s cloud:

Image: Amazon