
Amazon EKS – Now Generally Available - jacobwg
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-now-generally-available/
======
013a
Been waiting for this for... 7 months now since its announcement at ReInvent?

My initial impressions are very negative. What even is the _point_ of this?
The clusters themselves do nothing, they're just a control plane you pay
$144/month for. You need to add nodes from CloudFormation? Is there any
integration at all with CodeBuild/CodeDeploy/CodePipeline? No mention anywhere
of Ingress... I sure hope that's built in, but from what I'm reading it isn't?
What was Amazon thinking by releasing this so unfinished?

~~~
CSDude
Do you think management nodes are free? Master nodes need to run etcd+kube
api. These master nodes are multi region available with HA configured, which
will be expensive even if you use smaller instances yourself. Google might be
free but if you are already in AWS and do not want to manage Kubernetes
masters at all and treat your worker nodes like cattle, it is a very nice and
enough solution.

What integration do you need? The good thing about EKS is that it is CNCF
Conformant Kubernetes, meaning anything works with upstream Kubernetes works
here, including ingress controllers that already work with both ALB and
ELB+Nginx.

I am not defending Amazon, most of their managed services suck and very slow,
but both preview and GA experience of EKS was great and enough for me.

~~~
derefr
> Do you think management nodes are free? ... Google['s management nodes]
> might be free

Indeed they are. Why do you think that is?

It could be that they're a great big loss-leader for GKE, or that the costs of
GKE management nodes are amortized into the per-cluster-node costs. But
neither of these seem to be true. (The pricing of GKE management nodes before
they made them free was negligible; and GKE nodes don't cost any more than
equivalent GCE nodes.)

The real answer, I think, is that K8s management nodes really are just not all
that big a deal to run. Certainly not $144/mo of a big deal.

~~~
alpb
Google Kubernetes Engine has announced general availability (GA) of "free"
highly-available (HA) control plane support yesterday. You can read more here:
[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-
cluste...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-clusters-in-
Google-Kubernetes-Engine-are-now-generally-available.html) disclaimer: I work
at Google.

~~~
puzzle
Isn't it funny how Google announces free GKE stuff the day before EKS was
announced AND made generally available? :-) Like Jobs issuing a press release
that the App Store had hit 3B downloads the morning of the Nexus One launch.

~~~
yebyen
I'd speculate that Google did it on purpose the first time (everyone knew
there had to be an announcement coming, and the date of re:Invent was well
known in advance.)

Given what some are saying in this thread here today, I would not be the least
bit surprised to learn that Google's announcement this time actually forced
Amazon's hand, and that the folks on this afternoon's Amazon's twitch stream
actually found out yesterday that they'd be making the announcement today.

(Sure, I'd be speculating, but fight me.)

~~~
puzzle
Yeah, it was safe to assume they would announce something related at
re:Invent, given that they had joined the CNCF a few months before, after
simply ignoring Kubernetes for years.

------
ksajadi
I find Amazon’s attitude towards the whole Kubernetes lukewarm at best. It
seems they really wanted ECS to be the killer container service on AWS but
when k8s took over the mindshare they reluctantly added Fargate and EKS at
slow speed and with an underwhelming product.

We worked with both AWS container solutions and GKE and find GKE far superior.
We had to build Skycap as deployment solution for our applications on top of
it but the end result is an amazingly simple system delivering HA and
robustness we never could have imagined with any other solution as easily.

~~~
darren0
Amazon is extremely data driven. If their attitude is lukewarm at best then
you might consider the market is lukewarm at best.

People take for granted that the value of k8s has been proven. It has not. The
value of containerizing your application is clear and has been realized over
and over again. The jury is still out on k8s.

~~~
user5994461
>>> The value of containerizing your application is clear and has been
realized over and over again. The jury is still out on k8s.

The value of containerizing applications is negligible if there isn't the
orchestration to go with it.

~~~
darren0
Not really, the value of containers that most people have seen is that it's
just a more portable package. It's easier to move between environments in a
consistent way. If I do that with fancy orchestration, shell scripts, or
configuration management largely doesn't matter. I can get most of the
advantages with shell scripts.

~~~
venantius
As someone who has worked in an environment where thousands of machines were
being deployed to, this is ridiculous. Orchestration is an area where good
tooling makes an absolutely massive difference. Shell scripts are not a good
tool for observability or handling rollbacks.

~~~
sheeshkebab
Most environments (99.99%) don’t have thousands, hundreds, or frankly even
dozens of machines to deploy to.

~~~
user5994461
You're on hacker news, where technologists who run world class infrastructure
congregate.

The average number of servers per people who commented this news is over one
thousand.

~~~
sho
I seriously doubt that. 1000+ servers is a _lot_. The number of organisations
worldwide running that many servers in any sort of coordination must be pretty
low. Services (or "pods") sure, but actual servers? Can't be more than a few
hundred companies, surely.

One would also think that by 1000-ish servers it's starting to make a lot of
financial sense to move out of AWS anyway.

~~~
boulos
Amusingly, since there are only 200 comments, his statement is true simply by
the luck of saying average: multiple companies that comment here are in the
tens to hundreds of thousands plus servers range, bringing up the average for
everyone :). That said, I'd be deeply surprised if the median was breaking
100. 100 dual-socket servers gets you a lot of compute these days!

------
yebyen
> You pay $0.20 per hour for the EKS Control Plane, and usual EC2, EBS, and
> Load Balancing prices for resources that run in your account

Objectively that's not bad for HA masters in separate AZs, but I think for
those who have been using Kubernetes on the Google cloud it's certainly going
to have a hard time competing with "you don't pay anything for HA masters at
all."

> ingress

from the Twitch stream, it sounds like they have not worked out ingress with
ALBs. No mention of Ingress on the announcement page. Twitch stream is
here[1]. (it's over now) [2]

This is going to be super expensive to use in the near term.

Just now Nishi Davidson has just mentioned ingress/ALB is a focus of the sig-
aws, so hopefully we can expect another announcement soon.

[1]: [https://www.twitch.tv/aws](https://www.twitch.tv/aws)

[2]:
[https://www.twitch.tv/videos/269722012](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/269722012)

~~~
allanbreyes
HA seems like a poor choice as a default. I don't want to pay ~$150/month for
dev and staging clusters, and I certainly don't need them to be HA.

IIUC, Google/GKE and Microsoft/AKS are single-zone by default... free for
masters, but not free for HA.

~~~
idunno246
Until recently gke was charging 0.15/ hour too, so aws is just a little behind

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/11/Cutting-
Cluster...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/11/Cutting-Cluster-
Management-Fees-on-Google-Kubernetes-Engine.html?m=1)

~~~
yebyen
Not only recently, but actually this was the cost until _yesterday_ for GKE
with HA masters distributed across AZs[1]!

I only heard that this announcement from AWS was likely coming this morning,
over here in the thread about upgrading GKE clusters[2]. Given how long we've
waited since the announcement at November's re:Invent, there's honestly not a
lot that seems terribly rushed about this news, but I bet that AWS really
would have liked to have Ingress controllers that are integrated with ALB
ready for this announcement to go with their CNI plugins.

"Why am I waiting for Amazon to get out of preview when Google's been giving
it away this whole time?" For AWS customers that aren't locked in, that seems
like a reasonable train of thought.

[1]: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-
cluste...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Regional-clusters-in-
Google-Kubernetes-Engine-are-now-generally-available.html)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236794)

------
simonebrunozzi
AWS reacted to Google's (GCP's) success (Kubernetes), by trying to build a
competitor, leveraging its market leadership position. A strategy which was
very unlikely to succeed, from the get go.

Unfortunately for AWS, current market domination doesn't help much in this
case. It cannot be solved by yet another two-pizzas team.

I believe that AWS is trying to fight (or downplay) the scenario in which, in
a few years, when a lot of containerized workloads will be in production, GCP
will be a force to deal with.

That's it. Plain and simple. My 0.02.

(disclaimer: I worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 as tech evangelist, and I
spearheaded the VMware+GCP partnership in 2015-2016 when I was vCloud Air's
CTO at VMware - opinions here are my own, and are not based on any
confidential information).

(second disclaimer: if you think the first disclaimer is not necessary here,
you probably haven't worked much in large corporations, or at least didn't
experience or witness the same things that I did).

~~~
an_account_name
About your second disclaimer - are you worried someone would try to punish you
for this comment, or are you trying to say that generally most commentators
have undisclosed conflicts of interest?

(I work at Amazon but not AWS, opinions my own but geez I’m not gonna type
that every time)

~~~
yebyen
"You had an undisclosed agenda this whole time? How could you! I trusted you,
anonymous stranger on the internet! This is an injustice that can never be
forgiven!!!"

Get used to hearing this! Not the parent poster, but I've been on the
receiving end of that.

~~~
jacques_chester
This is pretty much why I sign almost all of my posts.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. My agenda is that I work there. I exchange my
labour for financial consideration. I am partly motivated by that
consideration. Pivotal. The company is called Pivotal.

------
jpetrucc
I've been so excited for experimenting with EKS ever since the announcement
but this offering looks very underwhelming.

With kops [0] I can spin up a production cluster on AWS quickly and have just
as much functionality (if not more control) without paying Amazon ~$150/mo for
the pleasure (per cluster!). It doesn't really seem to be "managed" either.

Maybe now's the time to really start to look at GCP/GKE. I've used them for
some GitLab CI stuff in the past but never invested too much time into really
seeing how the transition from AWS to GCP is.

[0]: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kops](https://github.com/kubernetes/kops)

~~~
iddqd
When setting up production clusters via kops on AWS I opt for c4.large
instances for the master, which with a HA quorum costs $250/month. If you use
the default master instance type in kops, m3.medium, it's around $174/month. I
fail to see the problem with AWS charging $150/month for a fully managed
alternative.

------
theossuary
For those trying to spin it up while the docs aren't available, I ran into
some issues with the IAM role.

Basically, create a new role with a trust relationship to `eks.amazonaws.com`,
with the AmazonEKSClusterPolicy and AmazonEKSServicePolicy attached to it, and
you should be good.

Thank you AWS, for having consistent naming schemes.

------
bboreham
For interest: a CLI tool to simplify the initial process of cluster creation
[https://eksctl.io](https://eksctl.io)

~~~
yebyen
^ superbly underrated comment here

------
allanbreyes
FYI: EKS is currently only available in us-west-2 (Oregon) and us-east-1 (N.
Virginia)

~~~
danielmartins
Not as generally available as I thought, and for the looks of it, feels just
as "hacky" as the preview with respect to the user experience. For some
reason, I was expecting more from them.

------
zedpm
Oof, $150/month base cost? No small workloads on EKS, I guess.

------
shaohua
any frontend eng from EKS, you should look at the chrome console.

""" Warning: It looks like you're using a minified copy of the development
build of React. When deploying React apps to production, make sure to use the
production build which skips development warnings and is faster. See
[https://fb.me/react-minification](https://fb.me/react-minification) for more
details. """

------
knoxa2511
Are docs available yet? The pages aren't working for me.

\- [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/what-is-
eks...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/what-is-eks.html)

Same with getting started guide - [https://aws.amazon.com/getting-
started/projects/deploy-kuber...](https://aws.amazon.com/getting-
started/projects/deploy-kubernetes-app-amazon-eks/)

~~~
NathanKP
The documentation should be up now. Try a hard refresh in your browser if you
are still seeing an error page.

------
caio1982
Oh my, that's expensive for a master.

------
vira28
Noob here. I hear ECS, EKS, and Fargate. Can someone explain whats the
difference between them and when to use one over another. Thanks.

~~~
yebyen
ELI5: do you want to manage EC2 nodes and run containers on them? Use ECS
(until you outgrow it. Why not... it is the cheapest of the three.)

Do you want to run Kubernetes in production, but afraid to do it yourself?
(You probably know already who you are...) Container clusters composed of EC2
nodes, but joining the rest of the civilized world whose dev team thinks in
the abstractions of K8S? Use EKS, today's announcement is for you.

Do you absolutely not want to manage EC2 nodes, but want to run containers?
Use Fargate. Coming soon, Fargate for EKS will reunify the two threads.

~~~
vira28
Awesome Thanks.

------
georgewfraser
Does this mean ECS is going away? It’s sort of strange that they have two
managed-container-deployment products.

~~~
jedberg
Most likely yes. They've seen the writing on the wall, that K8s has won. It
will probably just be a slow deprecation like they did with Simple DB.

~~~
hb3b
It wasn't a particularly friendly service for developers, anyway.

~~~
k__
Isn't ECS the AWS optimized version and EKS the more basic stuff?

~~~
scribu
No, ECS is a homegrown container orchestration service that has no
relationship with Kubernetes.

EKS is the optimized-for-AWS version of Kubernetes.

There’s also AWS Fargate, which is a more managed version of ECS.

~~~
k__
ECS was specifically created to work good with AWS.

How can EKS be better for AWS customers?

~~~
ec109685
Because the open source kubernetes components have thousands of developers
contributing to the code, as well a whole ecosystem of components built to
kubernetes’ api.

------
wnsire
The AWS dashboard is broken for me , show HTML class name above the inputs.

Not sure it's GA.

------
heisnotanalien
I am guessing it doesn't have Cloudformation support? So I have to spin up
instances manually and this is 'generally available' for production use?

~~~
dbenhur
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-
resource-eks-cluster.html)

~~~
heisnotanalien
Well that's a nice change!

------
apexapoc
expensive and limited. :(

