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Deconstructing Amazon’s Container Services Strategy

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Container services and related technologies took center stage at AWS re:Invent 2020, which has gone virtual. From unleashing ECS/EKS through the “Anywhere” strategy, turning Elastic Container Registry into a free open registry and adding container support to Lambda, Amazon has given a fitting response to competition and changing market dynamics. 

This year’s re:Invent also marks the official entry of Amazon into the multi-cloud world. Though the term multi-cloud is taboo for AWS, the suffix “Anywhere” implicitly conveys that some of its services can now run in other clouds, including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

The product marketing and branding teams at AWS worked hard in creating the “Anywhere” theme that acts as a moniker for multi-cloud. So, when you see a product from the AWS portfolio with the “Anywhere” suffix, interpret it as a multi-cloud service.

The Current Trends From the Container Landscape

During the last couple of years, two key trends have emerged in the container market. The first one has transformed Kubernetes into a preferred platform for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud computing. The second trend has resulted in a centralized control plane for managing multiple Kubernetes clusters running in almost any environment. 

Anthos from Google, Microsoft Azure Arc, VMware Tanzu Mission Control, Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift with Advanced Cluster Manager platforms are based on these trends. What is common among these offerings? You can either launch a managed cluster running in any environment or attach an existing cluster to the central control plane. 

MORE FROM FORBESEverything You Want To Know About Anthos - Google's Hybrid And Multi-Cloud Platform

Anthos is one of the first platforms built on the premise of Kubernetes as the control plane for hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Google made it possible to run the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), its flagship product and the industry’s best implementation run anywhere, including AWS, Azure, VMware, and even bare metal. It is also possible to attach non-GKE clusters to Anthos. Irrespective of where the clusters are running and how they are deployed, they are visible to the Anthos control plane running in Google Cloud. 

Once a Kubernetes cluster is tethered to the cloud, public cloud vendors can do many things with it. It becomes a vehicle to push managed services from the cloud to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Arc enabled data services from Microsoft and Google BigQuery Omni are examples of this trend. The former brings SQL and PostgreSQL managed services to any Kubernetes cluster, while the latter exploited Kubernetes to run BigQuery in AWS. 

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Google and Microsoft are going to leverage Kubernetes to decouple workloads from AWS managed services effectively. Today, it is possible to run an analytics workload in AWS that only relies on EC2 and S3 but uses BigQuery Omni as a data warehouse instead of Amazon’s own Redshift. The same is applicable for workloads consuming Arc enabled data services deployed on Kubernetes clusters running on top of EC2. 

In the multi-cloud world, Kubernetes is emerging as the new operating system. Any cloud provider can spin up a Kubernetes cluster in any other cloud and seamlessly offer managed services - even if it is running in its competitor’s environment.

MORE FROM FORBESWhy Azure Arc Is A Game Changer For Microsoft

This trend is a serious concern for AWS who promises to remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in operations. What’s worrying for Amazon is that the competition is doing the heavy lifting to make it easy for customers to reduce dependency on the AWS cloud. 

With the competition officially running their managed services in AWS, Amazon cloud’s value is reduced to a set of EC2 instances. The original promise of undifferentiated heavy lifting is getting hijacked by Google and Microsoft.

Amazon cannot be a mute spectator to the growing threat of competition exploiting its infrastructure. It has to respond to this before it’s too late.

ECS and EKS Anywhere - Unleashing Amazon’s Container Orchestrators 

AWS has announced two new flavors of its container orchestration engines - ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere. 

AWS chose ECS Anywhere, EKS Anywhere and EKS Distribution to counter the growing threat of multi-cloud and Kubernetes. 

Amazon created ECS much before Kubernetes became the de facto standard for container orchestration. Built on top of EC2, ECS is a sophisticated container scheduler that orchestrates a containerized workload. This is the foundation of Fargate, the serverless container platform and the managed batch computing service, AWS Batch.

With ECS Anywhere, customers can run ECS compute clusters outside of AWS and still manage them like a traditional ECS cluster. From bare metal servers to virtual machines and even a set of Raspberry Pi devices, ECS can manage external clusters running in various environments, including non-AWS clouds. 

Even after Kubernetes gained customer traction, AWS waited long before announcing a managed Kubernetes service in the form of EKS. Amazon wanted its customers to use ECS as the preferred orchestrator in AWS environment. After realizing that customers are deploying Kubernetes with open source tools such as Kops, it reluctantly launched EKS. Today, majority of the Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud are on AWS.

EKS Anywhere is a deployment tool that can provision a Kubernetes cluster based on the same components as the managed EKS stack. The only difference is that the control plane and worker nodes are run outside of AWS. Customers get the same binaries, components, open source code base used by the EKS teams. It is as good as running EKS but in your own environment or a non-AWS cloud platform with no SLA from Amazon.

Amazon has open-sourced the EKS stack under EKS Distribution which is available on GitHub. Both the managed EKS service in the cloud and the EKS Anywhere are based on the same code base - the EKS Distribution. 

ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere lay a strong foundation for Amazon’s hybrid cloud and multi-cloud ambitions.

The next part of this article analyzes how Amazon wants to leverage ECS Anywhere to expand its hybrid footprint.

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