re:Invent 2020 — AWS Container Services announcements

Last update: Jan 4th 2021, 10 am Indian Standard Time

I will be summarizing some of the important AWS Container services announcements on a periodic basis until re:Invent 2020 ends, as a purely personal placeholder for myself. Please do check the official blogs at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/ and https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ for a complete, comprehensive and official list. Please also follow follow @awscloud for #reInvent updates. Hope you find this useful !!

Amazon EKS

1. Support for provisioning and managing EC2 Spot Instances in managed node groups in the data plane in Amazon EKS — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-eks-now-supports-provisioning-and-managing-ec2-spot-instances-in-managed-node-groups/
2. Amazon EKS console gives you a single place to see the status of your Kubernetes clusters, applications, and associated cloud resources — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-the-new-amazon-eks-console/
3. Amazon EKS add-ons: lifecycle management for Kubernetes operational software — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-amazon-eks-add-ons/
4. AWS Step Functions integration with Amazon EKS, customers now have the ability to execute jobs in containers orchestrated by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-aws-step-functions-integration-with-amazon-eks/
5. Amazon EKS adds built-in logging support for AWS Fargate — Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to forward container logs from pods running on AWS Fargate to AWS services for log storage and analytics including Amazon Cloudwatch, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Amazon Kinesis Streams — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/fluent-bit-for-amazon-eks-on-aws-fargate-is-here/
6. New — Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) — a new deployment option in EMR that allows customers to automate the provisioning and management of open-source big data frameworks on EKS. With EMR on EKS, customers can now run Spark applications alongside other types of applications on the same EKS cluster to improve resource utilization and simplify infrastructure management — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-emr-on-amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service-eks/
7. Amazon EKS Distro — Amazon EKS Distro provides builds and code of open source Kubernetes, etcd, CoreDNS, upstream CNI Core binaries, CSI Sidecar Containers, and the latest security patches. Amazon EKS Distro is available as an open source project from GitHub and Amazon ECR Public Gallery — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-amazon-eks-distro/
8. EKS Anywhere — EKS Anywhere (coming in 2021) — Create and operate Kubernetes clusters on your own infrastructure. Amazon EKS Anywhere is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables you to easily create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises, including on your own virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal servers. EKS Anywhere provides an installable software package for creating and operating Kubernetes clusters on-premises and automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support. EKS Anywhere brings a consistent AWS management experience to your data center, building on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro (the same Kubernetes that powers EKS on AWS.) — https://aws.amazon.com/eks/eks-anywhere/ Sign up for a preview at https://pages.awscloud.com/Amazon-EKS-Anywhere-Preview.html

some screenshots from the new amazing Amazon EKS console !!

Tip: I had to add my IAM user to access the EKS dashboard for my cluster using this command.

eksctl create iamidentitymapping --cluster  eks-mng-fargate1 --arn arn:aws:iam::xx:user/mani --group system:masters --username mani

Managed add-ons — VPC CNI ..

Amazon ECS

1. Amazon ECS Anywhere (ECS Anywhere), an extension of Amazon ECS. Available in 2021, ECS Anywhere will allow customers to deploy native Amazon ECS tasks in any environment. This will include the traditional AWS managed infrastructure, as well as customer-managed infrastructure. More details at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-amazon-ecs-anywhere/ Please sign up for the preview at https://pages.awscloud.com/AmazonECSAnywherePreview.html
2. This is not probably a re:Invent announcement but Amazon ECS deployment circuit breaker in public preview, for EC2 and Fargate compute types. With this feature, Amazon ECS customers can now automatically roll back unhealthy service deployments without the need for manual intervention — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/announcing-amazon-ecs-deployment-circuit-breaker/
3. Amazon Elastic Container Service launches new management console, looks nice and the navigation across clusters/services/tasks is much simpler — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-elastic-container-service-launches-new-management-console/

New Amazon ECS console

Amazon ECR

1. Amazon ECR Public and Amazon ECR Public Gallery — Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) is a fully managed registry that makes it easy for a developer to publicly share container software worldwide for anyone to download. Anyone (with or without an AWS account) can use Amazon ECR Public to pull container software for use. Amazon ECR Public Gallery is a website that allows anyone to browse and search for public container images, view developer-provided details, and see pull commands — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/announcing-amazon-ecr-public-and-amazon-ecr-public-gallery/
2. Cross region replication (CRR) in Amazon ECR — Replication is configured at the ECR private registry level. This means, when you turn it on, all private ECR repositories in the registry automatically copy images to multiple other repositories in different accounts and/or regions, reducing pull latency that make your containers start up faster as they can now pull images in-region. Images in different regions also help you comply with disaster recovery requirements since the artifacts are geographically dispersed — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/cross-region-replication-in-amazon-ecr-has-landed/

Screenshot from the ECR console for CRR

New launches and others:

1. AWS Proton: a service designed for the platform engineering teams who want to offer their own self-service interface that provides opinionated methods for running serverless and container-based applications on AWS. More details at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/intro-to-aws-proton/
2. Fully Serverless Batch Computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate — the ability to specify AWS Fargate as a computing resource for AWS Batch jobs. With this enhancement, customers will now have a way to run their jobs on serverless computing resources: Simply submit your analysis, ML inference, map reduce analysis, and other batch workloads, and let Batch and Fargate handle the rest — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-fully-serverless-batch-computing-with-aws-batch-support-for-aws-fargate/
3. Preview — Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) — AWS has launched a preview of Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP). This fully-managed service is 100% compatible with Prometheus. It supports the same metrics, the same PromQL queries, and can also make use of the 150+ Prometheus exporters. AMP runs across multiple Availability Zones for high availability, and is powered by CNCF Cortex for horizontal scalability. AMP will easily scale to ingest, store, and query millions of time series metrics — https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-preview-amazon-managed-service-for-prometheus-amp/
4. Announcing Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (in Preview) — In partnership with Grafana Labs, AWS has announced in preview, Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG), a fully managed service that makes it easy to create on-demand, scalable, and secure Grafana workspaces to visualize and analyze your data from multiple sources https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-managed-grafana-service-in-preview/

I will be updating this blog over the period of next few weeks … Thanks !!