By sharing their workload, Kubernetes has changed the way many companies work. By using Kubernetes, you can seamlessly scale traffic changes. It helps in automating your container workflow. Additionally, Kubernetes provides container orchestration for your containers.
You can improve Kubernetes performance by running it on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Running Kubernetes on EKS will give you more control over managing, deploying, and even scaling your applications within containers. It offers a rich ecosystem and great flexibility alongside seamless container deployment on AWS. Furthermore, it gives you complete control over container customization.
While running Kubernetes cluster, you may face some of the challenges. One of them is to decide which cloud is going to deploy your applications. Once you look for options, you need to filter your choices depending on network, bandwidth, storage, and other features.
What is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service?
Amazon EKS is an AWS offering that comes as a managed container as a service (CaaS), allowing you to run Kubernetes on AWS. With EKS, you don’t need to install or operate Kubernetes. Kubernetes can even be run without operating the control panel or worker nodes.
To get a better understanding of Amazon EKS, let’s get an overview of Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is the most popularly used container orchestration engine that was launched by Google, in 2014. It works well for the cloud-native computing services. It was launched as an open-source engine that helps in automating, managing, and scaling thousands of containers at the same time without impacting their performance. It helps in load balancing, monitoring, controlling consumption of resources, and leveraging additional resources from various resources.
History of Amazon EKS
Today, most of the companies are running Kubernetes on AWS, making Kubernetes the core for the AWS customers. It allows them to run thousands of containers on AWS efficiently. As a result, in 2018, AWS announced that the Amazon EKS is available for customers who use kubernetes for simplifying the complete process, as there is no need to set up the Kubernetes cluster from scratch.
Before EKS was introduced and became available to all AWS customers, customers had to obtain some expertise to run and manage kubernetes clusters. Apart from this, the companies had to provision Kubernetes management infrastructure on several AZs. However, since the arrival of EKS, the problem has been resolved to much extent as it provides a production-ready architecture. It also helps in running and managing Kubernetes clusters across several AZs providing a wide range of features and functionalities.
How Amazon EKS Works
The major work of EKS is to simplify the process of managing and maintaining the high available clusters of Kubernetes within AWS. The two key components of Amazon EKS are- Control Plane and Worker Nodes.
Control Plane
The control panel of the Amazon EKS comes with the three Kubernetes master nodes which run across three different availability zones. Kubernetes API gets all the incoming traffic using the network load balancer (NLB), running on the virtual private cloud which is controlled by Amazon. Thus, organizations cannot manage the control panel directly and will need AWS for managing it.
Worker Nodes
Organization controls the worker nodes running on the Amazon EC2 instances within the virtual private cloud. You can use any instance in AWS as a worker node. You are allowed to access the worker nodes via SSH without the need of any automation. You can easily run the worker nodes cluster on the organization’s container. These nodes are managed and monitored by the control panel.
As an organization, you can easily deploy a Kubernetes cluster for every application due to the EKS layout flexibility. You can run more than one application on the EKS cluster using the Kubernetes namespace and configuration of AWS IAM. Companies can use the EKS instead of running and maintaining Kubernetes infrastructure.
Benefits of Elastic Kubernetes Service
Listed below are some of the benefits of using the AWS EKS.
-
Improves availability and observability
With the help of EKS, you can easily run the Kubernetes control panel across several AWS availability zones. It will help you in detecting and replacing the unhealthy or malfunctioning control panel nodes automatically. Apart from this, it offers you on-demand and zero downtime upgrades of the system including patching. It guarantees you 99.95 percent uptime. Not only this, it enhances the observability of your Kubernetes cluster and helps you identify and resolve the occurred issues.
-
Scales your resources efficiently
With EKS node groups, you do not need to provision compute capacity, which is how your Kubernetes cluster will scale. For running applications on Kubernetes, you can use the AWS Fargate service to provision serverless compute on-demand. The EKS nodes on Amazon EC2 are used to identify the instances that reduce costs and improve system efficiency.
-
Ensures secure Kubernetes environment
With EKS, you will get the latest security updates automatically and it will be poached to your cluster’s control panel. The community is very active and works with the AWS for addressing the crucial security issues and ensures that every Kubernetes cluster is safe and secure.
Amazon EKS Features
Amazon EKS allows organizations to take advantage of some of the most important features of the Amazon platform, including reliability, high resource availability, enhanced performance, and scale, as well as important integrations with the AWS network and security services. We have listed some of the key features of Amazon EKS below.
- Managed Control Plane
Along with Amazon EKS, you will get a highly available and scalable control panel efficiently running on several AWS AZs. EKS helps in managing and maintaining the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes cluster and API services. To ensure high availability, you can run the Kubernetes control panel on all three different availability zones, ensuring detection of the unhealthy nodes if present.
- Managed Worker Nodes
You can run a simple but efficient command for creating, updating, and terminating EKS’s worker node. These worker nodes run on the system with the help of the latest Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).
- Launch using eksctl
If you want to run the EKS within minutes, you can run the open-source command. This results in creating a Kubernetes cluster that is ready to run your application.
- Service Discovery
AWS has a cloud resource discovery service known as the Cloud Map. it helps the companies in defining the namespace for the application resources. Also, it helps to update the location for the dynamic resources. This leads in increasing the availability of the application as the company’s web service will discover the resources at the most updated location.
EKS also provides a connector for auto propagation of internal service registry locations, while Kubernetes will launch and remove them once they have been terminated.
Use cases
Below are the use case applications for Amazon EKS.
Hybrid Deployment
EKS allows you to manage the Kubernetes cluster and its running applications across hybrid environments. With EKS, you can even run the Kubernetes on your data center as well as on AWS. You can run your EKS-run applications near to the AWS local zones and AWS wavelength for getting the better performance of your application. You can also use AWS Outposts for EKS that helps in extending the AWS infrastructure, its services, APIs, and many other tools.
Machine Learning
To model the workflow of your machine learning, you can implement EKS with Kube Flow. It also helps in running the distributed training jobs with the help of the latest EC2 GPU-powered instances. To run training and interfaces using Kubeflow, you can leverage AWS deep learning containers.
Batch Processing
You can use the EKS cluster along with Kubernetes jobs API for running sequential and parallel batch workloads. EKS will help you in planning, scheduling, and executing the batch-related computing workloads across several AWS compute services like Amazon EC2, Fargate, etc.
Web Applications
It helps in creating web-based applications that can be scaled efficiently and can run in a highly available configs environment. It helps in improving the performance, scalability, and readability of your web applications. You will also get amazing integrations with AWSnetworking and security services like Load balancers for efficiently distributing the loads across the network.
Conclusion
Amazon EKS offers you complete and advanced integration with AWS services that will help in improving the performance of your applications running on clusters. It offers various features, tools, and technologies for managing and maintaining the Kubernetes cluster in a high availability zone. In this article, we have highlighted key points on Amazon EKS, its features, and various use cases. By reading it, you will get a complete picture of Amazon EKS and how it is important to organizations.