In case anyone needed more proof that Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestration platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today rolled out its own managed Kubernetes service.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the service, called Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), on stage at AWS re:Invent 2017. “This makes running Kubernetes as a managed service on top of AWS much, much easier,” he said.

Jassy also announced a new container deployment service, AWS Fargate, which allows customers to run containers without managing servers and clusters.

“No servers, no clusters, no provisioning,” he said. “It sets up all the surrounding infrastructure you need to run this thing — really hands off the wheel.”

Fargate is currently available for AWS’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and will support EKS next year.

AWS rival cloud company Google originally developed the Kubernetes software before turning it over to the open source community in 2015. Kubernetes now resides under the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) arm.

AWS already supports Kubernetes for container management and orchestration — and launched its own similar service, ECS, in 2014. “At that time there wasn’t really any broadly adopted orchestration and management system for containers,” Jassy said.

While hyping ECS’ benefits — “It scales in a much broader way than you will find with other container services,” Jassy said — he acknowledged that “a lot of people have become interested in Kubernetes.”

Recent reports have shown Kubernetes controlling more than 70 percent of the container orchestration market. And in a June CNCF survey, 63 percent of respondents said they hosted Kubernetes on Amazon’s EC2 platform, which was an increase from 44 percent the previous year.

EKS runs the latest version on Kubernetes and will automatically deploy across multiple availability zones. It can also automatically patch and perform upgrades, Jassy said, adding it is integrated with “a lot” of AWS features. “We’re working hard to make it integrated with all the capability that ECS has.”

AWS has been setting the stage for its Kubernetes move for several months. Reports surfaced over the summer that AWS was “feeling threatened” by Kubernetes’ popularity “and they don’t own it.”

Then in August, AWS joined CNCF as a platinum member, linking the move to the growing use of CNCF projects running on AWS.

Perhaps in anticipation of AWS’ announcement, Google yesterday said it eliminated the cluster management fee for its managed Kubernetes service, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

In addition to the new container services, AWS dropped a slew of other announcements in the opening day of AWS re:Invent 2017. These include:

• Deals with the National Football League (NFL), the Walt Disney Company, and Expedia. The NFL will use AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to power its player-tracking system. Disney selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider and will expand its use of AWS to migrate production workloads to the AWS cloud. Expedia is standardizing on AWS machine learning technologies across all of its online travel brands, which include Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Orbitz, trivago, CheapTickets, Travelocity, and Hotwire.
• A managed, intelligent threat detection service called GuardDuty that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads, analyzing trillions of events per day. GE, Netflix, Autodesk, Twilio, Webroot, and Mapbox are among the customers using the new security service.
• Bare metal cloud infrastructure for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Available now in preview, these are Amazon’s first bare metal servers offered to cloud customers and come more than a year after Oracle launched its bare metal cloud infrastructure. Bare metal improves performance because it allows customer applications to run directly on the underlying hardware while still providing the elasticity and scalability benefits of the cloud.
• A storage optimized instance family (H1 instances) designed for big data and data-intensive workloads. AWS also launched the next generation of general purpose instances, M5, which the company claims have up to 50 percent more vCPUs, 50 percent more memory, and 25 percent more network bandwidth than previous generation M4 instances.
• New features for AWS Marketplace. The Enterprise Contract, available in preview, is an agreed upon standardized contract template between enterprise software buyers and sellers. Additionally, Private Image Build enables customers to build and run custom Amazon Machine Images that combine their own IT-approved base operating system images with installable software provided by AWS Marketplace sellers.
• New AWS Partner Network (APN) programs, including the AWS Solution Provider Program for APN Consulting Partners. This will be available in early 2018 and replaces the Channel Reseller Program and has a new, tiered incentive structure.