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Open Source: Amazon EKS and other Cost Effective Container Services

Businesses are now looking for a fully managed container orchestration service that provides a secure, reliable and scalable way to run containerized applications.

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amazon eks
Author: Mensah Alkebu-Lan

Table of Contents #

Introduction #

A conversation about containers could begin with virtual machines. Virtual machine (VM) technology is something software developers are generally familiar with. VMs have been around for some time now, and they do share some characteristics with containers. While virtual machines (VMs) virtualize at the hardware level, containers virtualize at the operating system level. Container services can work with existing CI/CD tools to develop, update, and deploy containerized applications.

Many of the things you can do with virtual machines you can also do with container based services. Let’s take services based on Kubernetes for example. Without getting too deep into the architecture of Kubernetes, one of the fundamental structures within a Kubernetes deployment are something called pods. They can be thought of much like virtual machines or physical hosts, since, for example, each pod has its own IP address.

Amazon Web Services’ EC2 Instances #

It’s hard to talk about Amazon EKS without talking about EC2 instances. It’s a healthy conversation to have because any respectable cloud service provider is going to have their brand of what we call compute. EC2 instances are virtual servers. These instances offer secure and resizable compute capacity for almost any workload.

When creating an EC2 instance, you have a number of processors to choose from. You even have the choice of the AWS designed Graviton2 processor. These considerations are important for high performance computing workloads for example. And so when you’re looking for the best virtual server to use, it’s not just a matter of choosing the one with the lowest price.

EC2 instances come in a variety of different ec2 instance types. The benefit of having so many instance types is being able to choose the one that best meets the needs of the workload. For example, you may want to choose the most cost-effective instance type for the workload.

As of this writing, the following types are available:

  • General purpose instances
  • Compute optimized instances
  • Memory optimized instances
  • Accelerated computing instances
  • Storage optimized instances

Amazon EKS #

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) makes it easier to run Kubernetes clusters on the cloud. It is a fully managed Kubernetes service that provides a secure, reliable, and scalable way to run containerized applications. It is a fully managed certified Kubernetes conformant service.

Amazon EKS is able to integrate seamlessly with other AWS services. For example, software developers can use Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer to distribute incoming traffic to Amazon EKS (or Amazon ECS) via an Application Load Balancer or Network Load Balancer.

One of the service’s attractive features is its monitoring capabilities. The Amazon EKS control plane logs provide audit and diagnostic information directly to CloudWatch Logs. Amazon EKS is flexible enough to allow users to leverage open source Kubernetes plugins. It is also a good choice for organizations seeking to migrate from existing Kubernetes environments.

More about Amazon EKS from the Open Source Community #

More about Container Services on YouTube #

References #

  1. Containers on AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/containers/services/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  2. Comparing Cloud Container Services Across AWS, Azure, and GCP | CloudHealth by VMware. https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/cloud-container-services-aws-azure-gcp. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  3. Azure Containers—Services and Management. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/containers/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
    Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service - Overview of Deployment Options on AWS. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/overview-deployment-options/amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service.html. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  4. Secure and resizable cloud compute – Amazon EC2. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  5. Amazon EC2 Instance Types - Amazon Web Services. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  6. AWS Announces Three New Amazon EC2 Instances Powered by AWS-Designed Chips | Amazon.com, Inc. - Press Room. https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/aws-announces-three-new-amazon-ec2-instances-powered-aws. Accessed 1.8.2022.
    Azure Container Apps | Microsoft Azure. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/container-apps/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  7. Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/kubernetes. Accessed 1.8.2022.
  8. Elastic Load Balancing. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/. Accessed 1.8.2022.
    Services, Load Balancing, and Networking | Kubernetes. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/. Accessed 1.8.2022.

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