AWS Tightens EKS and AWS Marketplace Integration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week made available an extension of the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) service that makes it simpler to add software downloaded from the AWS Marketplace for Containers to a cluster.

Announced at the AWS re:Invent 2022 conference, the extension makes it easier to install, configure and update using the same commands that IT teams already use, such as the EKS console, command-line interface (CLI) tools such as eksctl, AWS application programming interfaces (APIs) or infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CloudFormation and Terraform.

Barry Cooks, vice president of Kubernetes for AWS, says the goal is to remove the friction that is encountered when IT teams separately log into the AWS Marketplace to download software.

In general, Kubernetes adoption has reached a tipping point among enterprise IT organizations that are now deploying cloud-native workloads at scale in production environments. Rather than deploying Kubernetes themselves, however, many of those organizations rely on AWS to manage instances of Kubernetes as they opt to focus more of their efforts on building and deploying applications, says Cooks.

There are, of course, plenty of instances of Kubernetes being managed by internal IT teams. Cooks noted that more organizations are concluding that managing infrastructure such as Kubernetes clusters themselves doesn’t provide enough value to be worth the time and effort. Instead, after first becoming familiar with how Kubernetes works, many organizations are choosing a cloud service provider to manage what are rapidly becoming fleets of Kubernetes clusters, he adds.

Instead of running a small number of large clusters, organizations are opting to run many Kubernetes clusters to provide better isolation between workloads to limit the blast radius should an issue with an individual cluster arise, notes Cooks.

One of the primary motivations for adopting Kubernetes is to reduce costs by dynamically scaling applications as needed versus provisioning a maximum amount of capacity for every legacy monolithic application that needs to be deployed, Cooks adds.

IT teams are also taking advantage of Karpenter, an open source tool that automatically right-sizes compute resources in real-time as cloud-native application workloads change and evolve, to contain cloud costs, he notes.

It’s not clear how eagerly enterprise IT organizations are embracing Kubernetes in the cloud, but as they do so, Cooks notes that one of the most immediate challenges any IT team encounters is defining a set of DevOps best practices for managing application environments based on Kubernetes. While AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, there is still a need for IT teams to create DevOps pipelines for building and deploying applications that are constructed using microservices based on containers.

Of course, monolithic applications are not going to disappear overnight. IT teams will be managing monolithic applications alongside microservices-based applications for years to come. The issue will be determining how many of those monolithic applications will need to be refactored to run on top of a Kubernetes cluster versus continuing to run them at what ultimately is a higher total cost.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

Mike Vizard has 1615 posts and counting. See all posts by Mike Vizard