Amazon Web Services (AWS) may build a cloud container management tool based on Kubernetes.

A report in The Information, citing anonymous sources who do business with AWS, said “AWS is feeling threatened” by Kubernetes’ popularity “and they don’t own it.”

Google developed the open source software, which is now used by large technology companies like Red Hat, IBM, VMWare, and Canonical to manage clusters of containers on their customers’ infrastructure.

Kubernetes has also become a popular way to manage artificial intelligence (AI) tests across multiple machines.

Although AWS remains the leading public cloud, it’s facing increased competition from rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Public Cloud (GPC). Google has been especially focused on machine learning and AI services, and CEO Sundar Pichai has said Google plans to make GPC the “best cloud for machine learning.”

So a Kubernetes-based cloud service could help AWS attract more AI business.

AWS already supports Kubernetes for container management and orchestration — and has its own similar service called EC2 Container Service (ECS).

But it’s easier to use Kubernetes on GCP, which means customers that start using the software on AWS often switch over to Google, The Information says. It also quotes an anonymous source who says ECS usage is “less than stellar” and customers don’t like it.

Kubernetes, meanwhile, remains the leading container orchestration tool in a booming market that is forecast to grow from $762 million in revenues last year to nearly $2.7 billion in 2020.

According to a survey conducted as part of a recent SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, 64 percent of respondents said they were using Kubernetes. By comparison, 36 percent said they were using Swarm, and 18 percent said they were using Mesos.

AWS’ reported Kubernetes plans comes as the cloud giant appears to be looking to its competitors for ways to improve its cloud offerings.

The company is also rumored to be in talks with VMware about developing enterprise data center software. If the rumors are true, this would move AWS into the private cloud — and allow it to compete directly with Microsoft Azure Stack, which lets enterprises build a private-cloud version of the Azure public cloud in their own data centers.