On-Premises Kubernetes Game is Changing with Amazon EKS Distro
I’ve been working on Kubernetes projects for 4–4.5 years. The half of these projects are on-premises and the other half is on AWS. As you all know, Kubernetes become an industrial standard. It can be easily seen that Kubernetes usage in on-premise environments is considerable. While modernization containerization processes Amazon EKS is the best choice if you consider to run your workload on AWS. By using Amazon EKS, you can have a stable, flexible, scalable, cost effective and most importantly a K8s cluster that you don’t have to worry about it’s management. But things get more complicated if you choose to work on-premises. In this article, I’m going to talk about EKS Distro which AWS introduced at the Re:Invent event.
Container Cluster History in AWS
Before we get into the topic, I would like to talk about the history of container cluster on AWS. AWS introduced container cluster service in 2014 as Elastic Container Service(ECS). Using ECS would give you the opportunity of classic AWS experience. In 2017, AWS introduced Fargate service as a serverless solution to us. Fargate is a serverless container service which works with ECS and EKS. In 2017, Elastic Kubernetes Service was introduced as a preview, but in 2018 it could be fully used.
EKS Distro
Well, let’s talk about the main reason why we are here. Kubernetes improves really fast and comes with lack of stabilization and security. Using AWS’ Kubernetes distro on-premise environments would give you advantage on stabilization. At first, enterprise providers such as Rancher and Tanzu declare their support. If you are using these providers, now you can use EKS-D. You can use EKS distro with kubeadm as well.
Benefits
EKS-D has come to our lives as an alternative to enterprise Kubernetes platforms. Briefly, we are going to be able to use a reliable K8s version that created with high security standards and wide CVE audits.
- Amazon EKS can be used as a hybrid or multi-cloud.
- Let’s say you can not hold your data on AWS. You are going to be able to test your application on Amazon EKS by using EKS-D and deploy it to your production environment. This will provide us stabilization and velocity.
Shortly, with the EKS-D and the EKS Anywhere that AWS will announce soon, AWS will be a game changer. If you are using Kubernetes on-premise I suggest you to use EKS Distro!
