Amazon EKS Anywhere is an open-source deployment option for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) that allows customers to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises, with optional support offered by AWS. Recently, AWS announced the general availability (GA) of Amazon EKS Anywhere.
At AWS re:Invent 2020, the company preannounced new deployment options of Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere. Earlier this year, Amazon ECS Anywhere became GA, and now this also is the case for Amazon EKS Anywhere. With EKS Anywhere, customers can leverage an installable software package for creating and operating Kubernetes clusters on-premises and automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support. EKS Anywhere is based upon an open-source distribution for Kubernetes – the Amazon EKS Distro, which is also used by Amazon EKS. Furthermore, EKS Anywhere is also open source.
Channy Yun, a principal developer advocate for AWS, stated in an AWS News blog post on the GA of EKS Anywhere:
You can reduce the complexity of buying or building your own management tooling to create EKS Distro clusters, configure the operating environment, and update software. EKS Anywhere enables you to automate cluster management, reduce support costs, and eliminate the redundant effort of using multiple open-source or third-party tools for operating Kubernetes clusters.
With Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere, customers will have several deployment options for their Kubernetes cluster. For example, a respondent on a Reddit thread wrote as a response to using EKS Anywhere locally and Amazon EKS in AWS:
EKS Anywhere and managed EKS in AWS will have some differences simply because of the environments where they run. They're both using EKS Distro so the binaries/control plane will be the same.
Your plan of progression from local -> test -> prod is a good idea especially if test and prod environments will be EKS clusters in AWS.
In addition, a respondent on a Hacker News thread stated:
In 8-12 months, EKSA will either be very successful or will die, because it’s up against incumbent on-prem k8s so teams will either quickly see the benefits or it’ll quickly be dismissed as useless.
The target market seems to be infrastructure admins who have on-prem VMs and an AWS account and don’t like running their own K8s clusters. No idea what that market looks like in terms of size or interest in something like this, but I’m sure AWS did their homework.
Amazon EKS Anywhere integrates with various products from AWS partners such as Flux for cluster updates, Flux Controller for GitOps, eksctl – a simple CLI tool for creating and managing clusters on EKS, and Cilium for networking and security. Furthermore, the company also provides flexibility for customers to integrate with their choice of tools in other areas.
Currently, customers can download and install Amazon EKS Anywhere on their on-premises infrastructure. Moreover, guidance and documentation are available on the landing page and FAQs. And lastly, there are no upfront costs or fees for using Amazon EKS Anywhere, yet there is an option to purchase additional support.