AWS’s container service gets support for Kubernetes

AWS today announced its long-awaited support for the Kubernetes container orchestration system on top of its Elastic Container Service (ECS).

Kubernetes has, of course, become something of a de facto standard for container orchestration. It already had the backing of Google (which incubated it), as well as Microsoft and virtually every other major cloud player. So AWS is relatively late to the party here but it does already have over 100,000 active container clusters on its service and that these users spin up millions of containers already.

AWS’s users are clearly interested in running containers and indeed, many of them already ran Kubernetes on top of AWS, but without the direct support of AWS. But with this new service, AWS will manage the container orchestration system for its users. ECS for Kubernetes will support the latest versions of Kubernetes and AWS will handle upgrades and all of the management of the service and its clusters.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that when the company launched ECS, there wasn’t really a container orchestration system like Kubernetes. He stressed that ECS is deeply integrated with the rest of the AWS platform and that it scaled “in a much broader way than other container services.”