Recently AWS announced the general availability of Amazon ECS Anywhere, a new capability in Amazon ECS that enables customers to quickly run and manage container-based applications on-premises, including virtual machines (VMs), bare-metal servers, and other customer-managed infrastructure.
Since Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) release in 2014, the company provided customers with options to run tasks on the compute services outside of an AWS region, such as AWS Wavelength and AWS Outposts. However, due to regulatory, latency, and data residency requirements, there is also a need to run workloads on-premise. With Amazon ECS Anywhere, customers now have that option. The fully-managed container orchestration service allows customers to run, scale, and secure Docker container applications on any customer-managed infrastructure in addition to all AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS hybrid infrastructure deployments (e.g., AWS Outposts and AWS Wavelength).
In a press release on the Amazon ECS Anywhere, Deepak Singh, VP, compute services at AWS, said:
Customers have told us that while they need to run containers on their own infrastructure, they don't want the hassle of operating their own cluster management software. They love the simplicity of Amazon ECS, the fact that it just works, and want the same reliability, scalability, and security of Amazon ECS wherever they run their applications. With Amazon ECS Anywhere, we are proud to provide our customers exactly what they've asked for—a single service and control plane to manage their container deployments across AWS Regions, AWS Outposts, AWS Wavelength, AWS Local Zones, and customer-owned infrastructure, both in their data centers and at edge locations. Nothing else in the industry does that.
Customers can create an activation key to register their VMs or bare metal servers. Subsequently, install the AWS Systems Manager agent and Amazon ECS Anywhere agent on their on-premises servers, and then deploy and manage their applications using Amazon ECS Anywhere as the control plane for managing the environment.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/anywhere/
In an AWS News Blog post on the GA Release of Amazon ECS Anywhere, Channy Yun, principal developer advocate for AWS, wrote that the service provides consistent tooling and APIs for all container-based applications. Moreover, it offers the same Amazon ECS experience for cluster management, workload scheduling, and monitoring both in the cloud and on customer-managed infrastructure. As a result, customers can benefits from reduced cost and complexity by running container workloads such as data processing at edge locations on their own hardware, maintaining reduced latency, and in the cloud using a single, consistent container orchestrator.
In an extensive blog post on Hackernoon, the author Gokul Chandra stated in the end:
There are other use cases like cloud bursting, processing workloads at the edge, and containerize existing on-premises workloads where ECS Anywhere plays a prominent role. Based on the roadmap, ECS Anywhere, combined with other services in the AWS ecosystem in the future, will definitely make a significant impact in hybrid cloud space.
In addition, Mani Chandrasekaran, a principal solutions architect, Containers at Amazon Web Services, stated in his medium blog post:
With the GA of Amazon ECS Anywhere, the next frontier of leveraging existing compute resources in your data center to run managed containers using an orchestrator like Amazon ECS is now possible.
Lastly, ECS Anywhere integrates with various ECS Anywhere partners like DataDog, Pulumi, and HashiCorp to help customers take advantage of ECS Anywhere and provide additional functionality for the feature.
Currently, Amazon ECS Anywhere is available in most AWS regions where there is support for ECS. Pricing of the service is per instance hour for each managed ECS Anywhere task; more details are available on the pricing page.
