Here's my attempt to summarize what this service actually does, after reading the documentation in more detail:<p>Proton is an opinionated, 'self-service' application CI/CD workflow built on top of CloudFormation (for now, however it appears intentionally designed for future expansion).<p>The service defines separate workflows for two distinct teams in an organization, the 'Platform Team' and 'Developers'.<p>The Platform Team publishes two types of 'Template Bundles' ('Environment' and 'Service') for self-service usage by Developers:<p>- 'Template bundles' consist of a stack template (CloudFormation yaml that gets passed through a Jinja template filter), a schema file (defining inputs and outputs), and a manifest (metadata specifying the template language [CFn] and rendering engine [Jinja], intended for future expansion).<p>- 'Environment' templates define the set of shared resources and policies that Services are deployed into (e.g., VPCs, clusters, and shared load balancers or API Gateways);<p>- 'Service' templates define the AWS resources specific to the service (e.g., Lambda functions, ECS tasks, associated IAM roles, etc), Service bundles also include a separate 'Pipeline' template which defines a separate set of resources (e.g., CodeBuild Projects + CodePipeline Pipelines) used for building/testing/deploying instances of the service.<p>Developers then consume these template bundles for self-service deployment of CI/CD pipelines for their applications. First they create an Environment from a published Environment template, then create Services (containing one or more Service Instances) in an Environment from published Service templates. When a Developer creates a Service they connect it to their code repository, so new commits trigger the service pipeline to build+deploy the application code.<p>Finally, the Platform Team maintains its template bundles over time by publishing new minor/major revisions, and Developers manually opt-in to these version updates for their deployed Environments/Services.<p>The service also provides some curated template bundles (for Lambda and Fargate-based services), which is helpful because there's a ton of boilerplate in wiring up all of these parts together.<p>Overall, Proton seems to occupy a similar space as Service Catalog (admin-curated CloudFormation stack templates for self-service deployment by developers), but it provides a more managed, opinionated workflow with a shared Environment stack and separate CI/CD pipeline stack for each Service. Seems like an interesting attempt to standardize a bunch of these elements that go into a common use-case of CloudFormation-managed CI/CD pipelines for self-service application development.