EKS Anywhere
On this week’s episode of the Kubelist podcast, Benjie and I talked to Chandler Hoisington from AWS about EKS Anywhere. If you haven’t heard of EKS Anywhere, Chandler does a great job explaining it and why you should consider using it as your distro. It’s not easy to run a managed K8s service, and it’s even harder to run it in customer-environments (I know this first hand!).
Let’s go on to the newsletter links! As you might have guessed, this issue of the newsletter is going to be focused on the work AWS is doing to commoditize adoption of Kubernetes under the EKS name.
Issue #145
Let’s start at the product page for EKS Anywhere. Chandler explains this product on the podcast today, and we wanted to start with a link. EKS Anywhere is on-prem Kubernetes (the “anywhere” part), but it can be a supported Kubernetes distribution from Amazon, built on the same distro that EKS is. I’m really excited about what more target platforms and more adoption of this product might mean for Kubernetes adoption in general!
EKS-D is the open source version of Amazon’s EKS service, designed to run on your own infrastructure, by you. This isn’t a managed service, but it’s the core of the EKS service. Purely OSS, taking the bits that run the other AWS Kubernetes options. This is a good way to get started running your own local cluster, if you want to stay in the AWS ecosystem.
One of the coolest parts that shows the openness that AWS embraced while building EKS-D is in this SNS topic. If you have an AWS account, subscribe to this topic and you’ll get a notification when there’s a new release of EKS-D available. For those of us who like to run on-prem Kubernetes, this solves many problems, including the hard problem of triggering automation to roll out critical patch releases when there’s one available! 🔔
Normally we wouldn’t link to a partner page, but this one is different. The EKS project isn’t built on proprietary bits of Kubernetes; this is impressive. AWS has taken some of the best projects out there, learned how to get good at supporting them, and included the standard upstream versions of many in EKS Anywhere. From networking to gitops, and cost management to troubleshooting (😊) there are some good OSS projects here!
If you are an AWS shop but have some clusters not running in EKS, this project is good for you to get a little visibility. Right now this is just informational, but it will be interesting to see where it goes. There was a mention of this project on the podcast today also! 🔗
The public roadmap for the EKS projects. Need to know when IPv6 support will land? Or what about when EKS will support managed Windows node groups? Start here; this is cool. There aren’t dates on these, but you’ll know what’s coming. 🗺️
Congrats and a big thank you to @ParisInBmore, @stephenaugustus, @tophee, and @pythomit for all of your work in the Kubernetes project. Looking forward to your work on the Steering Committee!
