AWS Responds To Anthos And Azure Arc With Amazon EKS Anywhere – Forbes

Amazon made strategic announcements related to container services at the re:Invent 2020 virtual event. Here is an attempt to deconstruct the container strategy of AWS.

Containers

The cloud native ecosystem is crowded and even fragmented with various distributions of Kubernetes. Customers can choose from upstream Kubernetes distribution available for free or choose a commercial offering such as Charmed Kubernetes from Canonical, Mirantis Container Cloud, Rancher Kubernetes Engine, Red Hat OpenShift and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

Amazon has decided to jump the Kubernetes distribution bandwagon with Amazon EKS Distribution (EKS-D), which powers the managed EKS in the cloud. Customers can rely on the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS, which includes the latest upstream updates and comprehensive security patching support.

Amazon EKS-D comes with source code, open source tooling, binaries and container images, and the required configuration via GitHub and S3 storage locations. With EKS- D, Amazon promises extended support for Kubernetes versions after community support expires, providing updated builds of previous versions, including the latest security patches.

Customers running OpenShift or VMware Tanzu are more likely to run the same flavor of Kubernetes in the cloud. Most of the commercial Kubernetes distributions come with services and support for managing hybrid clusters. In this case, ISVs like Red Hat and VMware will leverage Amazon EC2 to run their managed Kubernetes offering. They decouple the underlying infrastructure (AWS) from the workloads, making it possible to port applications to any cloud.

Amazons ultimate goal is to drive the adoption of its cloud platform. With EKS-D, AWS has built an open source bridge to its managed Kubernetes platform, EKS.

Backed by Amazons experience and the promise to maintain the distribution even after the community maintenance window expires, its a compelling option for customers. An enterprise running EKS-D will naturally use Amazon EKS for its hybrid workloads. This reduces the friction between using a different Kubernetes distribution for on-prem and cloud-based environments. Since its free, customers are more likely to evaluate it before considering OpenShift or Tanzu.

Additionally, Amazon can now claim that it made significant investments in open source by committing to maintain EKS-D.

The design of EKS-D, which is based on upstream Kubernetes, makes it easy to modify the components such as the storage, network, security, and observability. The cloud native ecosystem will eventually build reference architectures for using EKS-D with their tools and components. This makes EKS-D better than any other distribution available in the market.

In summary, EKS-D is an investment from Amazon to reduce the friction involved in adopting AWS when using a commercial Kubernetes distribution.

According to AWS, Amazon EKS Anywhere is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables customers to easily create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises, including on their own virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal servers.

EKS Anywhere provides an installable software package for building and managing Kubernetes clusters on-premises and automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support.

EKS-A can be technically installed on any infrastructure with available compute, storage, and network resources. This includes on-premises and cloud IaaS such as Google Compute Engine and Azure VMs.

Simply put, Amazon EKS Anywhere is an installer for EKS-D with AWS specific parameters and options. The installer comes with the defaults that are optimized for AWS. It works best on Amazon Linux 2 OS and tightly integrated with App Mesh for service mesh, CloudWatch for observability and S3 for cluster backup. When installed in a VMware environment, it even provides infrastructure management through the integration with vSphere APIs and vCenter. EKS-A relies on GitOps to maintain the desired state of cluster and workloads. Customers can subscribe to an Amazon SNS channel to automatically get updates on patches and releases.

Amazon calls EKS-A an opinionated Kubernetes environment. The keyword here is opinionated, which translates to as proprietary as it can get. From container runtime to the CNI plug-in to cluster monitoring, it has a strong dependence on AWS building blocks.

There is nothing open source about EKS-A. Its an opaque installer that rolls out an EKS-like cluster on a set of compute nodes. If you want to customize the cluster components, switch to EKS-D, and assemble your own stack.

EKS-A supports three profiles - fully connected, semi-connected and fully disconnected. Unlike ECS Anywhere, EKS-A clusters can be deployed in offline, air-gapped environments. Fully connected and semi-connected EKS-A clusters talk to AWS cloud but have no strict dependency on the cloud.

EKS-A is Amazons own version of Anthos. Just like Anthos, its tightly integrated with vSphere, can be installed on bare metal or any other cloud. But the key difference is that there is no meta control plane to manage all the EKS-A clusters from a single pane of glass. All other capabilities such as Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) and Anthos Config Management (ACM) will be extended to EKS-A through App Mesh and Flux.

Unlike Anthos, EKS-A doesnt have the concept of admin clusters and user clusters. What it means is that customers cannot use EKS-A for the centralized lifecycle management of clusters. Every EKS-A cluster is independent of others with optional connectivity to the AWS cloud. This topology closely resembles the stand-alone mode of Anthos on bare metal.

EKS-A will eventually become the de facto compute environment for AWS Edge devices such as Snowball. Similar to K3s, Amazon may even plan to launch an EKS Anywhere Mini to target single node installations of Kubernetes for the edge. It may have tight integration with AWS Greengrass, the software for edge devices.

EKS-A is the first, real multi-cloud software coming from AWS. If you are not concerned about the lock-in it brings, EKS-A dramatically simplifies deploying and managing Kubernetes. It brings AWS a step closer to multi-cloud platforms such as Anthos, Azure Arc, Rancher, Tanzu Mission Control and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager for Kubernetes.

Though EKS-A comes across as a proprietary installer for EKS, it goes beyond that. Combined with a new addition called EKS Console, multiple EKS-A clusters can be managed from the familiar AWS Console. Of course, the EKS Console will provide visibility into all the managed clusters running in AWS.

EKS-A clusters running in fully-connected and semi-connected modes can be centrally managed from the EKS Console. AWS may open up the ability to attach non-EKS clusters to the EKS console by running an agent in the target cluster. This brings the ability to apply policies and roll out deployments from a single window.

When Amazon connects the dots between the EKS Console and EKS-A, it will deliver what Azure Arc promises - a single pane of glass to manage registered Kubernetes clusters. Extending this, EKS Console may even spawn new clusters as long as it can talk to the remote infrastructure, which will resemble Anthos. You see the obvious direction in which Amazon is heading!

The investments in ECS Anywhere, EKS Distribution, EKS Anywhere and EKS Console play a significant role in Amazons container strategy. They lay a strong foundation for future hybrid cloud and multi-cloud services expected from AWS.

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AWS Responds To Anthos And Azure Arc With Amazon EKS Anywhere - Forbes