Cloud services leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its “Elastic Container Service” (EKS) for Kubernetes, which brings the company in line with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in offering a fully managed Kubernetes service.
The company acknowledged that although AWS remained the dominant platform on which to run Kubernetes, there is still a lot of manual configuration that customers need to manage their Kubernetes clusters and they had asked the company to make it easier to use.
Remind Me What Kubernetes Is…
Kubernetes is the increasingly popular open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications.
(The ability of modern operating systems to package the services behind applications into separate containers, then run these across a cluster of machines, gave rise to tools that automate the deployment and networking of these containers. Enter Kubernetes: fundamentally a way of running online software across a vast array of machines as efficiently as possible.)
EKS Details
AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr said late yesterday: “Amazon EKS is built around a shared-responsibility model; the control plane nodes are managed by AWS and you run the worker nodes. This gives you high availability and simplifies the process of moving existing workloads to EKS”.
Google Cloud got in first: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) went live in 2015 (V 1.10 was released last week).
Azure’s Azure Container Service (AKS) meanwhile was rolled out for free in October 2017, with a model of only charging customers for virtual machines that “add value” to your business.
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As Computer Business Review reported last week, managed cloud provider Rackspace has also now launched a Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering, rolling it out across all geographies this month for its private cloud clients, with a public cloud service coming later in the year.
The Texas-based hybrid cloud specialist said unlike most other providers it will fully operate and manage the Kubernetes deployment, including the infrastructure – claiming users can save up to 50 percent versus deploying the open source system themselves.
According to the most recent data from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, AWS is the leading environment for Kubernetes however, with 57 percent of all companies running it doing so on AWS.
Jeff Barr added: “Amazon EKS simplifies the process of building, securing, operating, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters, and brings the benefits of container-based computing to organizations that want to focus on building applications instead of setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch.”
