AWS Announces AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

AWS’s serverless container capability makes it easier than ever for customers to deploy, manage, and scale Kubernetes workloads on AWS

Square, National Australia Bank, Babylon Health, and GitHub among customers and partners using Amazon EKS with AWS Fargate

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced that customers can now run AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), making it easier for customers to run Kubernetes applications on AWS. AWS Fargate, which provides serverless computing for containers, has substantially changed the way developers manage and deploy their containers. Launched two years ago to work with Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate has been broadly requested by Kubernetes customers. Now, with AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS, customers can run Kubernetes-based applications on AWS without the need to manage servers and clusters. To get started, visit https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/kubernetes.

Containers have become very popular because they allow customers to package an application and run it anywhere, improve resource utilization, and make it easier to scale quickly. Most cloud providers only offer one container offering built around Kubernetes. AWS built Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) before container orchestration gained wide interest and, because it is built on AWS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), it integrates easily with other AWS services. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of active clusters managed by Amazon ECS.

Over time, as Kubernetes became popular, many customers started running Kubernetes on top of Amazon EC2. Over 80% of the Kubernetes workloads in the cloud are running on AWS, according to Nucleus Research. Customers like the broad community and openness of Kubernetes, but it’s challenging for them to manage Kubernetes on their own, which is why they have asked AWS to help them solve this problem. A year and a half ago, AWS launched Amazon EKS, a managed Kubernetes service to make it easier to manage, scale, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters. Amazon EKS has been very popular and has given Kubernetes customers an extremely flexible way to model and run their applications. While Amazon EKS handles the Kubernetes management infrastructure, customers still need to patch servers, choose which Amazon EC2 instances to run on, patch the instances, scale cluster capacity, and manage multi-tenancy. These customers have asked AWS to further simplify running Kubernetes on AWS.

AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS combines the power and simplicity of serverless computing with the openness of Kubernetes. With AWS Fargate there is no longer a need to worry about patching, scaling, or securing a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances to run Kubernetes containers in the cloud. When customers run Kubernetes applications on AWS Fargate, it automatically allocates the right amount of compute, eliminating the need to choose instances and scale cluster capacity. Customers only pay for the resources required to run their containers, thereby right-sizing performance and cost. AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS also provides strong security isolation for every pod by default, removing the need to manage multi-tenancy. With AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS, customers can focus on building their applications rather than spending time patching, scaling, or securing a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

“AWS Fargate has made it so much easier for Amazon ECS customers to manage containers at the task layer versus worrying about servers and clusters,” said Deepak Singh, Vice President of Containers at AWS. “Our Amazon EKS customers have been clamoring for us to find a way to make Fargate work with Kubernetes, and we’re excited to do so today. With AWS Fargate, Kubernetes customers can truly take advantage of the elasticity and cost savings of the cloud when running their Kubernetes containers, and don’t have worry about patching servers, scaling clusters, or managing multi-tenancy.”

AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with more regions coming soon.

Square helps millions of sellers run their business from secure credit card processing to point of sale solutions. “As we modernize our stack with EKS, we are always looking for opportunities to increase our security posture and lessen our administrative burden,” said Geoff Flarity, Engineering Manager for CashApp, Square. “We’re excited by the potential for Fargate for EKS to provide out of box isolation and ensure a secure compute environment for our applications with the highest level of security requirements. In addition, the ability to right size portions of our compute consumption, ensuring optimal utilization without having to spend cycles on capacity planning or operational overhead, is extremely compelling. This is without a doubt the most exciting Kubernetes announcement of the year.”

National Australia Bank (NAB) is one of the largest financial institutions in Australia and offers a wide array of personal banking financial solutions to its customers. “Amazon ECS has already reduced NAB’s microservice development time by a factor of 10. With AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS, we expect to improve this even further by enabling low touch Kubernetes cluster management at scale,” said Steve Day, EGM of Infrastructure Cloud and Workplace, NAB. “By removing the need for infrastructure management, we expect AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS to reduce our development costs on new projects by 75%. Over the next 12 months, migrating to AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS will enable 100 NAB service teams with a managed microservices based platform to break down 50 monolithic applications into modern architectures.”

GitHub brings together one of the world’s largest community of developers to discover, share, and build better software. “GitHub is committed to being the home for all developers, which includes providing them with great experiences across a wide range of tools and platforms,” said Erica Brescia, COO, GitHub. “AWS is an important platform for developers using GitHub Actions and we’re proud to collaborate with them on the launch of Amazon EKS for Fargate. Our solution makes it easier than ever for developers to focus on getting their code to the cloud with a minimum of operational overhead.”

Babylon Health is a health service provider that provides a range of services including remote consultations with doctors and health care professionals via text and in-app video messaging. “Amazon EKS is vital in our mission to offer accessible and affordable healthcare across the globe,” said Jean-Marie Ferdegue, Director of Global Platform Engineering, Babylon Health. “By using EKS and EC2 Spot instances, we have a lightning fast micro-service architecture where 300+ containerised applications are built and deployed in a highly decoupled manner. We now have unprecedented high availability across the globe while reducing the average time to bring a change to the stack from four weeks to a matter of hours. Our offering is focused on affordability and the cost reduction of 40% across our critical clusters is a key part of delivering this vision. The availability of Fargate for EKS will shift the focus from running and operating complex orchestration platforms to operating a secure and scalable health system. This maximizes our engineering effort, both in terms of time and money.”

HashiCorp is an open source software company that enables organizations to have consistent workflows and to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. “Amazon EKS for Fargate enables developers and operations teams to offload the heavy lifting of infrastructure management to AWS,” said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO, HashiCorp. “EKS for Fargate allows development teams to be more self-sufficient by abstracting the minute-to-minute management of their infrastructure and freeing up more time to focus on best practices and delivery. By supporting EKS for Fargate on launch day, HashiCorp Terraform provides users with a turnkey solution for provisioning Kubernetes workloads that makes use of best practices such as infrastructure as code.”

Datadog is a monitoring service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services through a SaaS-based data analytics platform. “Containers and orchestration are becoming a standard practice for organizations looking to operate efficiently at scale,” said Ilan Rabinovitch, VP of Product Management, Datadog. “We’ve seen wide adoption of AWS Fargate throughout our customers. We are excited to see support extend to cover Amazon EKS, so that our customers can further simplify management of Kubernetes at scale on AWS.”

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