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Kubernetes Service and No-Fuss Container Deployment Come to AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) made several container technology advances this week at its re:Invent conference, announcing its Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) and unveiling a new container management model called Fargate.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes
AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the preview of the Amazon EKS offering during his Wednesday re:Invent keynote, adding that general availability is expected sometime in 2018. EKS is a managed service that aims to help developers run Kubernetes on AWS with relatively little manual configuration.
EKS "will automatically deploy Kubernetes masters across multiple availability zones" to ensure consistent high availability, Jassy said. Also, as a managed service, it automatically applies patches and upgrades, but defers to users if they want more control over scheduling updates.
It also integrates with many AWS services, including "Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution, IAM for authentication, Amazon VPC for isolation, AWS PrivateLink for private network access, and AWS CloudTrail for logging," according to a blog post by Deepak Singh, general manager of AWS Container Services.
Compatibility is also a key feature in EKS, Singh added: "Amazon EKS runs the upstream version of the open-source Kubernetes software, so you can use all the existing plugins and tooling from the Kubernetes community. Applications running on Amazon EKS are fully compatible with applications running on any standard Kubernetes environment, whether running in on-premises datacenters or public clouds. This means that you can easily migrate your Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS with zero code changes."
More information on EKS, including how to access the preview, is available here.
AWS Fargate
As Jassy said in the keynote, managed container services are all well and good, "but it would be great if we could run containers without having to run servers or clusters of these things."
Enter AWS Fargate, a new container management technology that aims to untether customers from the task of fussing with container infrastructure. Now generally available out of AWS' Northern Virginia region, Fargate "radically changes how you can run containers," Jassy said.
AWS Senior Technical Evangelist Randall Hunt shared more details about Fargate in a blog post Wednesday. According to Hunt, Fargate is "a technology that allows you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances. All you need to do is build your container image, specify the CPU and memory requirements, define your networking and IAM policies, and launch."
Fargate already works with the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Docker, and support for EKS will come in 2018. Pricing is determined in an on-demand basis; more information is available here.
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