Sam Dean | 26 February 2018
Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President of Cloud Architecture at Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on cloud native computing within the context of AWS in his keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.
Cloud native computing is transforming cloud architectures and application delivery at organizations of all sizes. Via containers, microservices, and more, it introduces many new efficiencies. One of the world’s leading experts on it, Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President of Cloud Architecture at Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on cloud native computing within the context of AWS in his keynote address at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.
Cockcroft has been working with next-generation cloud infrastructure for years. Prior to his role at Amazon, he helped Netflix scale its operations via the cloud and open sourced the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform.
In his talk, called “Cloud Native at AWS,” Cockcroft covered topics including Fargate container provisioning, running Kubernetes on AWS, and open source trends at AWS. “Cloud native computing is pay-as-you-go, emphasizing self-service,” he said. “You’re not going to have to invest in a data center and guess at how much capacity you are going to need next year. Through it, you can get very high utilization.”
Communities, code, and contributions
He emphasized that the open source team at AWS focuses on three things in particular: growing communities, improving code, and increasing contributions. He said that joining The Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has been an important part of the focus on communities.
What is AWS doing with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation? “We are promoting Cloud Native to enterprise customers,” Cockcroft said. “We are also integrating CNCF components into AWS ECS, and integrating Kubernetes with AWS.”
Cockcroft stated that Fargate container provisioning is changing the compute consumption model. “Fargate dictates that a container is a native thing that AWS can manage,” he said. “We also have bare metal instances on AWS, where you can bring your own hypervisor.”
According to Amazon: “With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing.”
Elastic Container Service
A CNCF survey recently found that 63 percent of Kubernetes workloads run on AWS today. That attracted Amazon to work in-depth with Kubernetes. “In particular, we know that customers want to keep Kubernetes a completely open source experience,” Cockcroft said. “We are not forking Kubernetes. Everything we do is upstreamed. What customers have said is “please run Kubernetes for me.” Part of how we are doing that is EKS, Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.”
While running Kubernetes on AWS is very popular, there is still manual configuration involved, such as installing and operating the Kubernetes master and configuring clusters. EKS makes it easy for you to use Kubernetes on AWS without requiring expertise in managing Kubernetes clusters. Amazon EKS runs the upstream version of the open source Kubernetes software, so users can leverage and work with all the existing plugins and tools from the Kubernetes community.
EKS, Cockcroft said, is a platform for enterprises to run production-grade services, and it’s built for integration with existing services. “If EKS customers want to use additional AWS services, the integrations are seamless and eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting.”
Watch the entire keynote below:
Learn more about Kubernetes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, coming up May 2-4 in Copenhagen, Denmark.