Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that aims to make it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises. Amazon EKS is certified Kubernetes conformant, so existing applications that run on upstream Kubernetes are compatible with Amazon EKS.

Amazon EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes that are responsible scheduling containers, managing the availability of applications, storing cluster data, and other key tasks.

EKS lets users run Kubernetes applications on both Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate, which provides serverless compute for containers. Fargate automatically provisions and scales compute for containers. With Fargate, the user pays for the resources requested by applications to run. Each pod running on Fargate is isolated by design, which improves application security.

Amazon EKS is backed by AWS infrastructure, as well as integrations with AWS networking and security services, such as Application Load Balancers for load distribution, Identity Access Manager (IAM) integration with role-based access control (RBAC), and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for pod networking.

Amazon EKS provides a scalable and highly available Kubernetes control plane that runs across multiple AWS Availability Zones. Amazon EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes API servers and etcd persistence layer for each cluster. Amazon EKS runs the Kubernetes control plane across three Availability Zones in order to ensure high availability, and it automatically detects and replaces unhealthy control plane nodes.

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) lets users directly manage AWS services from Kubernetes. ACK enables users to build scalable and highly available Kubernetes applications that utilize AWS services.

Amazon EKS provides an integrated console for Kubernetes clusters. Cluster operators and application developers can use EKS as a single place to organize, visualize, and troubleshoot their Kubernetes applications running on Amazon EKS. The EKS console is hosted by AWS and is available automatically for all EKS clusters.

EKS add-ons are common operational software which extend the operational functionality of Kubernetes. You can use EKS to install and keep this software up to date. When an Amazon EKS cluster is started, the user can select the add-ons to run in the cluster, including Kubernetes tools for observability, networking, autoscaling, and AWS service integrations.