Amazon Web Services was the last of the major cloud vendors to go all-in with the Kubernetes container-orchestration project that became a de facto standard last year, but after announcing its plans for a managed Kubernetes service last year at AWS re:Invent, that service became generally available Tuesday.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which oversees Kubernetes, requires vendors to go through a certification process in order to offer a managed service using the project, and AWS announced Tuesday that Amazon EKS is now “Kubernetes conformant,” not that anybody was really worried about passing the test. Kubernetes users have been running the software themselves on AWS for a long time, but the addition of a managed service gives AWS customers a little more help dealing with Kubernetes, and brings AWS into parity with Microsoft and Google on this front.
AWS cited CNCF data that 57 percent of Kubernetes users are running the software on AWS, compared to 33 percent who are running it on Google Cloud (where it was originally developed) and 16 percent on Microsoft Azure. The numbers add up to more than 100 percent because an increasing number of people are using Kubernetes to manage deployments across multiple public clouds or between public clouds and on-premises data centers, as travel giant Sabre has begun to do.
Amazon EKS rolled out today to the usual opening regions for a new service: US East in Northern Virginia and US West in Oregon. More regions are coming “very soon,” according to an AWS blog post, and the company also plans to announce new features for the service later this year, with re:Invent 2018 in late November a likely venue.
