Developers working with containerized apps on Amazon Web Services have a new tool to help them manage their workloads.
Today, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced the new EC2 Container Service, an AWS service that makes it easy to run apps in Docker containers on Amazon’s cloud. Developers can spin up a cluster of different Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, and deploy several containerized components to that cluster seamlessly with a single tool.
The service itself handles a lot of the heavy lifting and instance management. It knows the technical capabilities of each instance in the cluster, and manages the deployment of each application component to the instances that can best handle it.
Budget-conscious companies don’t need to worry about any additional cost with the new service, either. Users still need to pay for the compute resources that they’re using, but taking advantage of the Container Service is free.
Containers are all the rage in cloud development these days, with good reason. The technology, first developed by Docker, allows developers to build and run an app anywhere – on their personal development machines, an on-premise data center, or on a massive production environment in the private cloud.
The announcement of this service comes a week after Google announced its new Container Engine service at the Google Cloud Platform Live conference in San Francisco. Microsoft has also thrown its hat in the container support ring, with
Amazon’s Container Service is currently in a preview state. Users interested in taking it for a spin can sign up here.
