Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes), a managed Kubernetes service for managing software containers.
The public cloud giant announced EKS at re:Invent conference last year to simplify the operation and installation of Kubernetes on AWS.
According to a survey by CNCF, 57% of Kubernetes users run Kubernetes on AWS, compared to 33% on Google Cloud and 16% on Microsoft Azure.
Earlier the users needed specialized expertise to operate Kubernetes clusters. They also had to provision Kubernetes management infrastructure across multiple Availability Zones, and perform updates without causing downtime.
Amazon EKS will help users eliminate the complexity and provide architecture for production use to automate the management of Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple AZs. It can automatically detect and replace the unhealthy nodes.
“More customers run containers on AWS and Kubernetes on AWS than anywhere else,” said Deepak Singh, Director of AWS Compute Services. “Prior to Amazon EKS, customers either had to do considerable work to architect a highly fault-tolerant way to run Kubernetes, or just accept a lack of resiliency. With the launch of Amazon EKS, customers no longer have to live with either of those trade-offs, and they get a highly available, fault-tolerant, managed Kubernetes service. It’s no wonder so many of our customers are excited.”
EKS further makes it easier to launch the Kubernetes cluster in AWS Management Console, by automating the heavy lifting during managing, scaling and upgrading Kubernetes clusters. Developers can run existing Kubernetes apps on EKS with the same coding.
Customers using Amazon EKS will also get access to networking and security services of AWS, like AWS PrivateLink, Application Load Balancer, AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM), CLoudTrail, etc.
Additionally, AWS is teaming up with Kubernetes community to help broad range of customers use Kubernetes. For identity and access management for EKS, it has partnered with Heptio, while Alcide and Twistlock will power security to EKS.
The other partners included Tigera, HashiCorp, Weaveworks, Cisco AppDynamics, Cloudbees, Cloudera, and more.
Also read: Amazon Neptune graph database service now generally available
Amazon EKS is now generally available to AWS customers in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions.
