Amazon Web Services (AWS) today introduced its AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK), a new tool that enables users to leverage Kubernetes for more control over AWS service resources.

In a blog post announcing the new tool, the cloud giant boasted how ACK “makes it simple to build scalable and highly-available Kubernetes applications that utilize AWS services” by allowing users to define AWS services and resources directly within a Kubernetes cluster. In this regard, ACK basically provides a method to manage AWS services using Kubernetes. 

And if you’re thinking you’ve seen an AWS operator before – you have. ACK is the open source relaunch of the AWS Service Operator project that was first introduced in 2018. The new project “continues the spirit of the original AWS Service Operator” with the addition of a few updates based on feedback from the community and internal stakeholders. 

To that end, AWS has enabled cloud resources to be managed directly through AWS APIs instead of CloudFormation, making Kubernetes “the single ‘source of truth’ for a resources desired state.”

It also added AWS Go SDK, which automatically generates code for controllers and custom resource definitions (CRDs) with human editing and approval. The idea here is to eliminate the need to manipulate code and instead simply implement data, moving operations and provisioning from humans to machines.

ACK is currently in developer preview and supports S3, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, DynamoDB, Amazon ECR, and AWS API Gateway.  

The new tool from AWS mimics similar offerings from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP released the beta version of its Config Connector late last year. And Azure followed suit announcing Azure Service Operator in June.

AWS is last to the table – just as it was the last of the big cloud players to adopt Kubernetes – but showing up late sure beats never showing up at all. The AWS move actually garnered compliments from Google's Staff Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) tweeting, “AWS Controllers for Kubernetes is pretty dope. You can leverage Kubernetes to manage AWS resources such as API gateways and S3 buckets. Think Terraform but backed by Kubernetes style APIs and 'realtime' control loops."