Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Unifies & Monitors Across Hybrid Clouds

AWS used its re:Invent 2024 conference this month to explain how users can now run their on-premises infrastructure in Amazon EKS clusters using Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes. So does that mean private on-premises cloud being “encouraged” to use the public cloud unified management technologies offered by Amazon EKS clusters (a service designed to help organizations select, install and configure third-party Kubernetes software) in Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes? 

It does, but that’s not as “come one and all to hyperscale” as it might sound. Amazon EKS clusters enable cloud-native development teams to run containerized applications using the Kubernetes platform without having to manage the underlying infrastructure of the Kubernetes control plane, so there is freedom to grasp here if it’s done right.

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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Hybrid Nodes is the new feature that makes this happen, and it’s a new feature for cloud teams to attach their on-premises and edge infrastructure as nodes to EKS clusters in the cloud.

Unified Kubernetes Management 

According to AWS technical writer Channy Yun (윤석찬), there’s an opportunity here to unify Kubernetes management across cloud and on-premises environments and take advantage of the scale and availability of Amazon EKS in all the actual physical places an organization’s applications need to run – even if that place is not in the public cloud.

The arrival of Amazon EKS means on-premises company datacenter private cloud can deploy Kubernetes for its orchestration virtuosity, all while offloading the responsibility for managing Kubernetes control planes to EKS.

We don’t need to analyze why managing Kubernetes control planes can be tough i.e. amount of configuration and provisioning complexity required can be massive, especially when running large, complex applications that scale across multiple clusters. So having that systems management headache handled by AWS EKS means a company can conserve on-premises capacity (needed for compute, data ingestion, analytics as well as output channels and storage) for actual live production workloads. 

Consistent Operations & Tooling 

“Using Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, you can adopt consistent operational practices and tooling across your cloud and on-premises environments,” explained Chan, in an AWS blog. “Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes expands our support for hybrid Kubernetes deployments, adding to Amazon EKS on AWS Outposts and Amazon EKS Anywhere, which we introduced previously. [Users] can compare how Kubernetes and hardware components are managed with each of the EKS hybrid deployment options.”

AWS has extended its hybrid Kubernetes freedom play with an additional service enhancement known as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Auto Mode. As it sounds, there is automation on offer here, this technology is designed to streamline Kubernetes cluster management for compute, storage and networking, from initial provisioning to onward maintenance. How auto-streamlined is this automation? One-click does the job, says AWS.

Cloud-native development teams are here teased with the prospect of being able to achieve more agility and cost-efficiency by eliminating the operational overhead of managing the cluster infrastructure required to run production-grade Kubernetes applications at scale on AWS.

This service is built to simplify Kubernetes management by automatically provisioning infrastructure, selecting optimal compute instances, dynamically scaling resources, continuously optimizing costs, patching operating systems and integrating with AWS security services. This use of Amazon EKS enables deployments to use the open standards and portability of Kubernetes with the foundational cloud infrastructure advantages of AWS cloud. 

Kubernetes Convenience

In a third layer to this club sandwich of Kubernetes convenience, AWS also launched enhanced observability for container workloads running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This new capability is hoped to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR) for your cloud-native enterprise applications.

According to AWS principal developer advocate Donnie Prakoso, this capability helps teams detect and fix container issues faster by providing detailed performance metrics and logs. Its arrival in many ways dovetails and extends last year’s enhanced observability offering that appeared in Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, a capability to improve your observability for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

“Container Insights with enhanced observability addresses a critical gap in container monitoring,” wrote Prakoso, on an AWS technical blog. “Previously, correlating metrics with logs and events was a time-consuming process, often requiring manual searches and expertise in application architecture. Now, with this capability, CloudWatch and Amazon ECS automatically collect granular performance metrics such as CPU utilization at both the task and container levels while providing visual drill downs enabling easy root-cause analysis.”

In terms of other extras, Amazon EKS offers a curated set of AWS-built Kubernetes software, also known as Amazon EKS add-ons, that provide key operational capabilities for Kubernetes clusters and integration with various AWS services for cluster and pod networking, load balancing, storage, observability and security.