Kubernetes, Four Years Later, and Amazon Redefining Container Orchestration

Well, here we are. Kubernetes turns four years old this month—technically, on June 7, 2018—the very same platform that brings users and data center administrators scalable container technologies. Its popularity has skyrocketed since its initial introduction by Google. Celebrating the project’s birthday is not the only thing making the headlines today. Amazon recently announced the general availability of its Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (EKS), accessible via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Once upon a time, it wasn’t a simple task to orchestrate and manage containers in the cloud. Up until this recent EKS announcement, it was up to the administrator to spin up a virtual machine through an Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service, run Kubernetes on top of a traditional Linux server installation in EC2 and rely on other AWS moving components to host the container image registry. The entire process was very involved. Not any more!

The excitement doesn’t end there. Companies like Heptio (co-founded by the folks who gave us Kubernetes, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda) have positioned themselves to enhance the user experience around the Kubernetes technology by producing products and services to simplify and scale the Kubernetes ecosystem. The Heptio Kubernetes Subscriptions (HKS) package offerings help users run Kubernetes in AWS EKS, EC2 or on-premises.

Visit Amazon's EKS product page and Heptio's company website to learn more.

Petros Koutoupis, LJ Editor at Large, is currently a senior performance software engineer at Cray for its Lustre High Performance File System division. He is also the creator and maintainer of the RapidDisk Project. Petros has worked in the data storage industry for well over a decade and has helped pioneer the many technologies unleashed in the wild today.

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