On AWS? Love Kubernetes? I Got Three Letters for You: E-K-S!!!


AllCloud Blog:
Cloud Insights and Innovation

As Kubernetes is taking over the Micro Services world, allowing for comprehensive Docker and other containers orchestration, AWS serves Kubernetes, as usual through a no-sweat, no-hassle managed service:

  • AWS will manage for you the deployment of new clusters with just a few clicks in your AWS Console UI.
  • EKS will deploy and maintain Kubernetes Masters (including highly available ETCD nodes) across your availability zones.
  • To deploy worker nodes you can use Auto Scaling groups and feed the credentials for them to join the cluster via the USER DATA section.
  • You can use SPOT instances as well as worker nodes to reduce costs.
  • You can use EKS within the VPC and without exposing the cluster to the public net.
  • EKS will use a special CNI (VPC-AWS) provider to allow PODs within the cluster to have a real VPC IP, resulting in iron level networking speed without the need to use the slower overlay network mechanisms.
  • This CNI provider can be used right now for any Kubernetes running in AWS!
  • You can use any 3rd party tool that is valid for Kubernetes on EKS (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, etc.).
  • Support starts with K8S v1.7
  • Updates of K8S patches and minor versions can be done automatically by AWS (example: 1.7.3 to 1.7.5).
  • Upgrades of major versions can be done automatically and have rollback support as well (example: 1.7 to 1.8).
  • EKS will only support 3 latest major versions, and will enforce upgrade once the version you use, gets obsolete compared to latest 3 major supported releases.
  • In the future, EKS will support running Micro Services without need for actual nodes, as it will run the Pods on top of AWS “Fargate Serverless Container Service.
  • EKS will soon be able to support K8S network policies via a special CNI that is co-developed with Calico (one of the leading Micro Service network security providers).

Contact us for more info about AWS EKS and how to start using it.

Jack Bezalel

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