AWS App Runner
By Amazon Web Services
AWS App Runner is a fully managed service for deploying containerized web applications and APIs directly from source code or a container image, handling build, deployment, load balancing, and auto-scaling automatically.
Definition
AWS App Runner is a fully managed service for deploying containerized web applications and APIs directly from source code or a container image, handling build, deployment, load balancing, and auto-scaling automatically.
Overview
AWS App Runner, launched in 2021, was designed to simplify container deployment on AWS compared to configuring Amazon ECS or Kubernetes clusters directly. Instead of manually wiring together a load balancer, auto-scaling group, and container orchestration, a developer points App Runner at either a source code repository (which it builds automatically) or an existing container image, and App Runner provisions everything needed to run and scale the service behind an HTTPS endpoint. App Runner targets the same 'give us a container, we'll run it' simplicity as Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Apps, positioning it between the low-level control of a self-managed ECS/EKS cluster and the narrower execution model of AWS Lambda. It automatically scales the number of running instances based on request volume and can scale down during periods of low traffic to reduce cost, while still keeping a minimum number of instances available to avoid the cold-start behavior typical of pure function-based serverless. Because it removes most infrastructure decisions, App Runner is commonly chosen for straightforward web services and APIs where a team wants managed scaling and load balancing without the operational complexity of running their own ECS or Kubernetes cluster.
Key Features
- Deploys directly from source code repositories or container images
- Automatically builds, deploys, and load-balances the application
- Auto-scales instance count based on request traffic
- Built-in HTTPS endpoint with automatic TLS certificate management
- Simpler setup than manually configuring ECS or EKS clusters
- Health-check-based automatic recovery of unhealthy instances
- Integrates with AWS IAM, VPC networking, and CloudWatch logging
- Pay-for-what-you-use pricing based on compute and memory usage