these releases, ACS will henceforth become deprecated, with its functionality
provided by either individual vendors, or via Microsoft’s updated AKS solution.
AKS is a great starting point for users looking to get a container platform
quickly up and running. However, it still lacks the maturity expected with an
enterprise platform, and does require additional integration for a production
ready system. That said, both AKS and ACI have great potential, and should be
considered by those looking at managed container solutions.
Amazon Container Services
AWS’ container service offerings have had a slight edge against public cloud
rival Azure, providing three key offerings: Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Ser-
vice); Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes), similar to Azure
Kubernetes Service; and AWS Fargate (equivalent to Azure Container Instances).
Compared to Azure's initial ACS efforts, AWS ECS provided a more mature
solution for users. With the orchestration of containers managed by AWS (not
based on Kubernetes), all a user has to do is specify the instances they would
like under the container worker nodes, create a task file (think of this as a
Docker file) and let ECS manage the rest. However, there are still lots of engi-
neering teams who would prefer to use Kubernetes on AWS for their container
deployments.
Like Azure, AWS introduced their managed Kubernetes service, Amazon EKS,
to reduce the operational overhead required to deploy and operate the core
components of a Kubernetes cluster. According to CNCF, 63 percent of Kuber-
netes deployments run on AWS. Announced earlier in the year, EKS finally pro-
vides all those IaaS Kubernetes AWS deployments with a managed container
service that is highly available (deployed across various availability zones).
AWS has had more robust container services to start with, compared to its
Microsoft counterpart. Both Amazon ECS and EKS provide all the functionality
one needs to have a production-ready container platform up and running. AWS
gives users the ability to run managed container services via ECS, provides
managed Kubernetes services via EKS and managed, orchestrated and scaled
container services (serverless) via Fargate. However, unlike Azure, AWS does
not have an on-premises extension of their container solution. Given AWS’
recent release of on-premises RDS on VMware, the release of a container solu-
tion would not be unexpected.
Google Container Services
Google has been setting the pace when it comes to offering mature managed
container services based on Kubernetes, and it continues to maintain a healthy
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