Amazon EKS and ECS will soon be available to run on-premises on existing customer infrastructure. This is a major shift in the cloud provider’s hybrid container management strategy that may help reduce costs.
Due to be released in the first half of 2021, Amazon EKS and ECS Anywhere will offer software-only versions of the AWS container management services that users can run on their own infrastructure whether it’s VMs or bare-metal servers. Before now hybrid cloud customers have been required to use services from Amazon such as Outposts or Snowball Edge devices to run AWS software on premises which could be expensive. Outposts have a price tag starting at $100,000 upwards to $1 million for larger deployments. Snowball Edge jobs are designed for temporary deployments and include a daily device rental fee after 10 days.
EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) and ECS Anywhere (ECS-A) will be infrastructure agnostic unlike Local Zones which place limited compute resources closer to customer locations. EKS-A will support multiple Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu and AWS Linux along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
For those who want Amazon to manage the lifecycle of container clusters on premises, Amazon EKS-A will be a supported service. EKS-A will build in default cluster management tools such as a container OS, container registry, logging, monitoring, networking, and storage. Keeping some workloads on premises could lead to savings on bandwidth and data transfer to the cloud offsetting the cost of the service.
