OPA (Orchestrate Platforms and Applications) on AWS announced a new release and a very exciting one! The 0.3.3 release brings AI to OPA and accelerates the time to market for AI-based applications.
What's OPA?
OPA (Orchestrate Platforms and Applications) on AWS is a developer platform that simplifies the process of building applications on the cloud. The mission of OPA is to create a self-serve portal for developers to create AWS resources with minimum effort and no DevOps involved. OPA is built on top of Backstage and using its plugins, developers can easily create an environment on AWS using pre-configured environments and applications. OPA is customizable and built to be adjusted to every organization's requirements. OPA can scale across teams, environments, accounts, and regions - all together in a single platform. You can read more about OPA on the website.
NEW - AI on OPA
The rising demand for AI applications got into the platform engineering field and being able to create a platform to run AI workloads can accelerate your organization's delivery and demand. OPA added 2 templates to run AI workloads from the platform:
GenAI runtime environment provider template
GenAI RAG application template
Using those you can create multiple GenAI applications on different environments on AWS and templates and also use the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to connect your AI application to your DBs and data stores. Your AI application will be able to generate answers not only from old data it was trained on but also from new data added in the RAG.
Beside the provisioning the application, OPA allows changing configuration and testing your AI application with various of differents parameter. This way users can control their model configuration using OPA not only for day1 but also during the experimentation all the way to production.
NEW - Amazon ECS using EC2 nodes
ECS can run containers in many variations, for example on EC2 nodes. This way you can make sure your containers runs on specific instances, this is critical for 2 main use cases:
Security - Get better control over security by managing EC2 nodes.
Performance - Pick the instance that matches your applications’ special requirements like intense memory/cpu usage.
OPA added a template to create ECS using EC2 instances to the template catalog. You can use it and adjust it to your specific deployment.
Documentation Enhancements
There are documentation enhancements for previous capabilities, how to contribute, and for the new capabilities:
Security and Permissions updates
Kubernetes runtime and template docs
Contribution guidance
Architecture description and diagram improvements
General fixes to typos and clarifications
GenAI runtime and template docs
What's Next?
Environment Binding - Adding support to allow binding and connecting environment networks (VPCs) using AWS Transit Gateway for inter-application connectivity
AWS Control Tower Integration
AFT integration - account Factory for terraform
OPA on AWS Working Group in the Platformers Community
In the Platformers we recently launched a working group for OPA. In this working group, you can collaborate with other OPA users and keep to be up to date with OPA. You can explore more in the following links:
OPA on AWS @ Platformers Community
Working Group Slack channel - #wg-opa-on-aws
Learn more about OPA in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9HwnkkmQPA
Comments