News

AWS Announces Visual Studio 2022 on EC2, and Lambda TypeScript Tools

• By David Ramel
• 08/03/2022

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to nod to Microsoft-centric developers, most recently announcing Visual Studio on Amazon EC2, along with AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript.

The latter is for serverless computing, helping developers implement architectural best practices for using AWS Lambda functions, typically used for event-driven computing where blocks of code -- functions -- are executed in response to user or system-generated events. Specifically, those best practices for designing and operating reliable and secure systems in the AWS cloud are provided by the AWS Well-Architected Framework and its Serverless Lens.

Adhering to those best practices can reduce the number of bugs and boilerplate code needed to be written, while also accelerating remediation and speeding up the application lifecycle into production, AWS said. Additional benefits include mitigating deployment risks, offering more accurate production-readiness assessments and fostering more informed decisions to deploy systems and changes.

Thus, following on the heels of similar Powertools offerings for Python and Java, AWS recently announced the latest new package, AWS Lambda Powertools for Typescript, which provides a library of utilities for AWS Lambda functions running on the Node.js runtime -- working with both JavaScript and TypeScript code bases -- to ease the adoption of best practices such as tracing, structured logging, custom metrics and so on.

AWS said tenets of the Powertools offering include:

• AWS Lambda only. We optimize for AWS Lambda function environments and supported runtimes only. Utilities might work with web frameworks and non-Lambda environments, though they are not officially supported.
• Eases the adoption of best practices. The main priority of the utilities is to facilitate best practices adoption, as defined in the AWS Well-Architected Serverless Lens; all other functionality is optional.
• Keep it lean. Additional dependencies are carefully considered for security and ease of maintenance, and prevent negatively impacting startup time.
• We strive for backwards compatibility. New features and changes should keep backwards compatibility. If a breaking change cannot be avoided, the deprecation and migration process should be clearly defined.
• We work backwards from the community. We aim to strike a balance of what would work best for 80 percent of customers. Emerging practices are considered and discussed via Requests for Comment (RFCs)
• Progressive. Utilities are designed to be incrementally adoptable for customers at any stage of their Serverless journey. They follow language idioms and their community's common practices.

Visual Studio Software on Amazon EC2 with User-Based License Model
AWS this week also announced the general availability of license-included Visual Studio software on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instances. AWS takes care of the compliant licensing for the Visual Studio software, which uses a per-user subscription payment model.

"Amazon EC2 provides preconfigured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) of Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 and Visual Studio Professional 2022," AWS said in its Aug. 2 announcement post. "You can launch on-demand Windows instances including Visual Studio and Windows Server licenses without long-term licensing commitments.

"Amazon EC2 provides a broad choice of instances, and customers not only have the flexibility of paying for what their end users use but can also provide the capacity and right hardware to their end users. You can simply launch EC2 instances using license-included AMIs, and multiple authorized users can connect to these EC2 instances by using Remote Desktop software. Your administrator can authorize users centrally using AWS License Manager and AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD)."

After that administrator setup, AWS said its License Manager can help users manage software licenses across AWS and on-premises environments, coming from various vendors including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM . Also, developers can remotely connect to Visual Studio instances using their AD account information shared by administrators via Remote Desktop software.

The VS software offering is now available in all AWS commercial and public Regions.