New AWS services allow admins to run container technologies on-premises

Amazon announced four new container technologies this week that’ll make it easier for customers to run Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based container services in their data centers.

At the re:Invent conference, AWS rolled out services making its Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) more portable.

EKS is Amazon's service supporting the open-source Kubernetes engine. ECS provides extra functionality to integrate more deeply with AWS, including platform-specific cluster management, scheduling, and monitoring.

Until now, both services have focused on the AWS public cloud infrastructure. Customers who wanted a hybrid container solution needed to integrate Amazon's services with their own on-premises container engines.

With ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere, AWS brings its cloud-based container functionality to customers' data centers. ECS Anywhere gives them the same tooling and APIs in their data centers as they'll find in the AWS-based service, it said, meaning they don't have to manage things using their container orchestration setups.

The same goes for EKS Anywhere, which offers consistent EKS management tooling across AWS and on-premises domains, the company said. It uses the same EKS Distro version of Kubernetes that runs in the cloud-based EKS service.

Amazon launched AWS Proton, a new DevOps-focused service that helps developers create, deploy, and manage software pieced together from smaller units of container-based and serverless code. The service provides a dashboard showing all the deployed container and serverless technologies in a team's technology stack and enables them to update services on the fly. It will help teams apply best practices, such as CD/CD pipeline adoption, the company said.

Finally, Amazon unveiled Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public, which is a version of its container registry service that allows developers to publish and share container images publicly. The previous version of ECR only allowed developers to share container images inside their organizations. 

ECR Public will include a gallery that lets people browse and search for public container images without signing into AWS. This puts it in direct competition with Docker Hub, which also allows developers to publish and share container images.

ECR Public and Proton are available now, while the Anywhere products will ship in the first half of next year.