The company’s new container application service helps developers build, deploy, and run high-performance containerized web applications and APIs with just a few clicks
This week Amazon Web Services announced AWS App Runner, a fully managed container application service. The App Runner makes it easier and faster for customers to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
The new service handles all of the operational aspects of high-performance applications and APIs, including provisioning, scaling, and managing the container orchestrators, load balancers, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
App Runner also allows customers to run containers without having to think about servers or clusters at all. Customers simply provide their source code, container image, or deployment pipeline and AWS App Runner builds and deploys the web application or API. The service also load balances network traffic, scales capacity up or down based on demand, monitors application health, and encrypts traffic by default.
Ease of use, with no up-front costs
AWS says its App Runner helps customers can take advantage of the portability, efficiency, and cost savings of containers – even if they lack prior experience running and managing containers. It also helps development teams focus on their business applications instead of configuring services and managing infrastructure.
There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS App Runner, and customers pay only for the compute and memory resources used by their application, Amazon said.
AWS Principal Advocate Martin Beeby detailed the new service in a blog post. “Containers have become the default way that I package my web applications,” he said.
“Although I love the speed, productivity, and consistency that containers provide, there is one aspect of the container development workflow that I do not like: the lengthy routine I go through when I deploy a container image for the first time.”
“AWS App Runner makes it easier for you to deploy web apps and APIs to the cloud, regardless of the language they are written in.” Beeby explained. This is true “even for teams that lack prior experience deploying and managing containers or infrastructure,” he added.
“The service has AWS operational and security best practices built-it and automatically scale up or down at a moment’s notice, with no cold starts to worry about.”
AWS App Runner is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland).