Introducing Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Preview)

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes clusters.

Previously, you had to manage the scaling and availability of your Kubernetes masters and persistence layer by choosing appropriate instance types, running them across multiple Availability Zones, monitoring their health, and replacing unhealthy nodes. You needed to patch and upgrade your masters and worker nodes to ensure you were running the latest version of Kubernetes. This all requires expertise and a lot of manual work.

Amazon EKS fully manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane for each cluster. With Amazon EKS, upgrades and high availability are managed for you by AWS. Amazon EKS runs three Kubernetes masters across three Availability Zones in order to ensure high availability. Amazon EKS automatically detects and replaces unhealthy masters, and it provides automated version upgrades and patching for the masters. Amazon EKS is built using open source, upstream Kubernetes, so you can use all the existing plugins and tooling from the Kubernetes community. Amazon EKS is also integrated with many AWS services, so you can take advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, IAM authentication, Amazon VPC isolation, AWS PrivateLink access, and AWS CloudTrail logging. Applications running on Amazon EKS are fully compatible with applications running on any standard Kubernetes environment, whether running in on-premises datacenters or the cloud. This means that you can easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS without any code modification.

Amazon EKS is in Preview. Visit the detail page to learn more.