Announcing EKS Anywhere!

In the amazing 9 months that I have been at AWS, EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) has become a technology close to my heart . I have spent a good bit of my time working with customers, product management and engineers on ensuring we are building what our customers are asking for. Last week, AWS announced the GA of EKS-A. This blogpost introduces EKS-A to readers.

Amazon EKS Anywhere, is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables customers and operators to run open source Kubernetes clusters on premises. The first GA version supports deploying on VMware vSphere with future plans to support Bare metal clusters and other virtualization providers over time. EKS Anywhere also provides installable software packages for cluster creation and automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support. EKS Anywhere is based on the EKS Distro[1], and adds opinionated services for cluster lifecycle management. These include Cilium as the CNI, Flux as the GitOps operator and support for the cluster API.

As shown in the above illustration, with EKS Anywhere, customers can create and operate EKS Distro based +clusters on-premises.

1. From a deployment footprint standpoint, a single enterprise deployment will consist of a minimum of 5-6 nodes for a highly available control plane and worker nodes.
2. AWS will be providing an opinionated set of cluster creation and lifecycle management tooling. This includes NodeOS and at GA this will be bottlerocket or Ubuntu
3. The highly popular eksctl utility will be provided to provide operational consistency with eks on aws
4. Cilium will be packaged for pod policy and CNI
5. Customer clusters can be integrated for authentication through any OIDC compliant Identity provider
6. GitOps will be supported – we will bundle in the flux v2 controller
7. Customers have the option to connect back to the EKS Console for visibility into cluster deployments across environments
8. As this is an opinionated bundle of open-source software to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters on-premises. AWS will be the single point of contact for any issues that customers run into with EKS Anywhere or any support needed for tooling to deploy it.

EKS Anywhere brings a consistent AWS management experience to your data center, building on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro, an open-source distribution for Kubernetes used by Amazon EKS. The below table lays out the core features across the various EKS distributions for handy reference.

EKS Anywhere will reduce the complexity of managing on-premise clusters as AWS includes an OS and will offer full support for it. Customers don’t need to buy or build their own management tooling to create EKS Distro clusters, to configure the operating environment, and update software. Finally, you can leverage the EKS console to view all your Kubernetes clusters, running anywhere.

AWS hopes to address 4 key use cases with EKS Anywhere –

1. Support hybrid cloud consistency as customers intend to operate both cloud-based and on-premise clusters using unified tooling
2. Support disconnected yet highly available clusters
3. Enable data sovereignty and compliance requirements for certain use cases which require data and control plane to stay on-premises
4. Support Application modernization initiatives via GitOps

References

[1] EKS Anywhere – https://anywhere.eks.amazonaws.com/

[2] EKS Distro – https://github.com/aws/eks-distro