Announcing Windows support for containerd runtime on EKS starting with Kubernetes 1.21
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports the containerd container runtime on Windows worker nodes. Containerd is a lightweight container runtime that manages the complete container lifecycle on its host system, from container image transfer to execution, as well as storage and network attachment. Customers with Windows workloads can now get similar performance, security, and stability benefits from containerd that are available to customers running Linux-based worker nodes.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports the containerd container runtime on Windows worker nodes. Containerd is a lightweight container runtime that manages the complete container lifecycle on its host system, from container image transfer to execution, as well as storage and network attachment. Customers with Windows workloads can now get similar performance, security, and stability benefits from containerd that are available to customers running Linux-based worker nodes.
With the latest EKS Optimized AMIs for Windows, customers with Windows workloads can now realize the benefits that come with the containerd runtime. Leveraging the same container runtime across all their organization’s workloads can help reduce the operational effort required to qualify different runtimes for workloads. Containerd’s smaller scope, compared to the Docker runtime helps improve security and pod startup latency in addition to freeing up additional CPU and memory for use by applications.
To learn more, visit the Amazon EKS Optimized Windows AMI documentation. To learn more about Amazon EKS, visit our product page.