AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform all offer services to run containerized workloads securely at scale, but which one is the best? Read to find out.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. The cloud has opened up new possibilities for the deployment of microservice architectures. Managed and unmanaged container services, along with serverless hosting options, have revolutionized the deployment of container workloads in the cloud. While an unmanaged or build-your-own approach for your container ecosystem in the cloud gives you greater control over the stack, you need to own the end-to-end lifecycle, security, and operations of the solution. Managed container services, on the other hand, are hassle-free and more popular due to their built-in integration with your current cloud ecosystem, best practices, security, and modularity. All three leading cloud providers—AWS, Azure, and GCP—have a strong portfolio of products and services to support containerized workloads for cloud-native as well as hybrid deployments. Kubernetes (K8s) remains the most popular container orchestration solution in the cloud. This enterprise-class solution is also the preferred platform for production deployments. Each of the major cloud service providers offer a native managed Kubernetes service as well as standalone container solutions. Both of these solutions easily integrate with the robust ecosystem of supporting services offered by your cloud platform, including container registries, identity and access management, and security monitoring. In this article, we’ll explore some of the more popular options for deploying containers in the cloud and use cases. Each of the major cloud service providers offers a number of available options for container workload hosting, which we’ll examine in the following sections. AWS provides a diverse set of services for container workloads, the most popular being EKS, ECS, and Fargate. It also offers an extended ecosystem of services and tools, like AWS Deep Learning Containers for machine learning, Amazon Elastic Container Registry, and EKS Anywhere (coming in 2021) for hybrid deployments. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) can be used to create managed Kubernetes clusters in AWS, where the deployment, scaling, and patching are all managed by the platform itself. The service is Kubernetes-certified and uses Amazon EKS Distro, an open-source version of Kubernetes. Since the control plane is managed by AWS, the solution automatically gets the latest security updates with zero downtime and ensures a safe hosting environment for containers. The service also has assured high availability, with an SLA of 99.95% uptime—achieved by deploying the control plane of Kubernetes across multiple AWS Availability Zones. AWS charges a flat rate of $0.10 per hour for EKS clusters, as well as additional charges for the EC2 instances or EBS volumes used by the worker nodes. The cost can be reduced by opting for EC2 Spot Instances for development and testing environments, and Reserved Instances for production deployments. EKS is most beneficial if you’re planning for a production-scale deployment of microservices-based applications on AWS, easily scalable web applications, integration with machine learning models, batch processing jobs, and the like. AWS Fargate is a serverless compute service for containers that can be integrated with Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS. It reduces operational overhead, as you don’t have to deploy and configure the underlying infrastructure for hosting containers, and you’re charged only for the compute capacity being used to run the workloads. The containers run in an isolated environment with a dedicated kernel runtime, thereby ensuring improved security for the workloads. You can also leverage Spot Instances (for dev/test environments) and compute savings plans for committed usage to reduce the overall cost. If you’re looking to switch from a monolithic to a microservices-based architecture, with minimal development and management overhead, AWS Fargate offers great benefits. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) can be used to host container services either in a self-managed cluster of EC2 instances or on a serverless infrastructure managed by Fargate. The former approach provides better control over the end-to-end stack hosting the container workloads. In addition, it provides centralized visibility of your services and the capability to manage them via API calls. If you’re using EC2 for the underlying cluster, the same management features can be used for ECS as well.
