re:Invent 2017 – Kubernetes Service, No-Fuss Container Delivery Come to AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS), made several container technology advancements this week at its reInvent conference. It announced its Elastic Container Service (EKS) for Kubernetes and unveiled a new container management system called Fargate. Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes AWS CEO Andy Jassy presented a preview of the Amazon EKS offering during Wednesday’s re:Invent keynote. He also stated that general availability is expected sometime in 2018. EKS is a managed service that helps developers run Kubernetes in AWS. It requires very little configuration. Jassy stated that EKS will automatically deploy Kubernetes masters to multiple availability zones to ensure high availability. It applies patches and updates automatically as a managed service. However, users can request more control over scheduling updates. Deepak Singh, general manager at AWS Container Services, wrote that it integrates with many AWS services including “Elastic load Balancing for load distribution and IAM for authentication,” Amazon VPC for isolation, AWS PrivateLink to private network access, AWS CloudTrail to log, and AWS PrivateLink for remote network access. Singh said that compatibility is a key feature of EKS. He added that Amazon EKS runs the upstream Kubernetes version, so you can use all existing plugins and tools from the Kubernetes Community. Applications running on Amazon EKS can be used in any Kubernetes environment. This allows you to easily migrate your Kubernetes app to Amazon EKS without any code changes. You can find more information about EKS, including how you can access the preview, here. AWS Fargate Jassy stated in the keynote that managed container services are great, but it would be great to be able to run containers without needing servers or clusters of them. AWS Fargate is a new container management tool that will free customers from the burden of managing container infrastructure. Fargate is now available in AWS’ Northern Virginia region. It “radically changes the way you can run containers,” Jassy stated. Randall Hunt, AWS Senior Technical Evangelist, shared more information about Fargate in a Wednesday blog post. Hunt explained that Fargate is a technology that allows containers to be used as a fundamental computing primitive without the need to manage the instances. You only need to create your container image, specify your CPU and memory requirements, and define your networking or IAM policies. Then, launch it. Fargate is already working with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Docker. Support for EKS will be added in 2018. Pricing is determined on an as-needed basis. More information can be found here. More information from AWS reInvent 2017: