The platform view from AWS 2022

The AWS EMEA Summit 2022 took place on 29 June 2022, as a free virtual conference that brings the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn more about all things AWS. 

Passenger Platform Engineer Asrin Dayananda tuned in for today’s keynote and presentations, eager to see what was being offered to help us continue to innovate quickly and deliver flexible, reliable software at scale. Here’s just a few of the developments he thinks those working in the transport technology space should keep an eye on.

Reduce operational burden 

AWS spoke about the growing reasons to utilise container orchestration to deploy containers. Tools such as Fargate – a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building containerised applications without managing servers –  and the Amazon ECS certainly caught our eye as a way to better scale-up containerised servers.

Supercharge your DevOps Practice

Managed DevOps tooling was a focus of today’s talks, encouraging developers to consider implementing a cloud-native, cloud-first approach. AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) – an open-source software development framework –  was highlighted as a way to better define cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. The tools are able to create infrastructure using programming methods like Test-driven-development. The platform team currently follow DevOps methodology where we build infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform and AWS Cloudformation but we will look into using AWS CDK to enhance our IaC as it would provide many benefits like enhanced testing methods.

Architecting for sustainability

Something that certainly matches Passenger’s own environmental ethos is Amazon’s goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040. Amazon claims they are on a path to powering operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Similarly, news of the AWS Customer Carbon footprint tool was definitely thought-provoking, offering a dashboard that provides an overview of the estimated carbon emissions associated with a business’s own AWS workloads. 

AWS Graviton Processor was also announced which delivers around 40% better price-performance than the current generation EC2 instances. Our platform team will be investigating the current architecture and looking to utilise these AWS Graviton Processors where possible to save costs and use less processing power than current generation EC2 instances.

The future looks exciting

The future of Passenger software is looking exciting as we are transitioning the last of our services to AWS cloud. Utilising AWS cloud as our main cloud provider provides us with the ability to scale our cloud infrastructure so that our applications can perform faster, and be more reliable and robust. 

Most Passenger applications are currently containerized and we plan to utilise AWS Fargate and Elastic Container service to manage and scale applications. We follow DevOps methodology where we build infrastructure as code using terraform and Cloudformation and we are excited to explore the AWS Cloud Development Kit which uses known programming languages like TypeScript, Python, Java, .NET, and Go to manage infrastructure. 

This has the added benefit of allowing us to apply our high-quality software engineering practices to infrastructure, the biggest benefit will be the ability to use test-driven development to create our infrastructure. The future certainly looks exciting with all of this (and more!) on the horizon.