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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this - I think internally there is a tussle on what is the strategic way forward.

There are so many - Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, EKS, ECS-on-Fargate, EKS-on-Fargate..and of course the huge marketing push for Serverless.

They could have the sensible way out and built EKS as the foundation of everything - makes total sense given the massive ecosystem around kubernetes. ECS and Fargate should be killed off.

https://cdk8s.io/ replaces Elastic Beanstalk ....but still basically runs on top of EKS.

The pairing of CDK8S and EKS are fundamentally enough for all usecases that AWS basically sells.

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CDK8S doesn't replace Elastic Beanstalk, because the folks using EB are going to continue to use EB. If it ain't broke...

ECS predates EKS, and is better integrated than EKS with their other services. If you want a painless container experience on AWS, ECS for Fargate is what'll you'll want to use today. So both existing folks who use ECS today as well as new customers are going to keep using ECS.

Folks who like K8, perhaps from prior experience, are going to use EKS despite it having some rough corners.

See, Amazon is perfectly happy to support everything under the sun as long as there are paying users. See their database offering for very much the same strategy, and it would be silly to say that they should drop DB x since they now offer DB y.

The different proponents who use ECS, beanstalk,etc are really talking about the UX. Because ultimately the orchestration stack is not visible to you.

And my whole point is that AWS is on the path to fix kubernetes UX and give you exactly the mental model you want...but run it on k8s.

Think of it as ECS, Beanstalk, Fargate on top of EKS.

You won't be asked to adopt the complexity of k8s

AWS doesn’t turn off barely used services, ECS has lots of happy customers that don’t want to deal with Kubernetes.

Same goes for Fargate, except that it’s now offered by EKS to, what possible reason would they have too turn it off?

Happy ECS on EC2 and ECS on fargate customer. I'd be really surprised if they turn these off - they just work in a very simple way to get stuff running. I have some "scheduled tasks" in containers, they run on fargate - works great and so easy to update.

CDK8S will actually abstract away the complexity of kubernetes. I don't think you will find the complexity any worse than ECS

I think it is a good strategy for AWS to invest in all kind of different solutions for Container technology and see which one wins. Betting on just one horse might end up being too high of a risk. Google has GKE, Cloud Run, Anthos and directly run containers on Compute Engine

k8s is not for everyone. It has a high administration and complexity burden. It would be a mistake to make k8s a requirement for core AWS services. Fargate is a low-level compute platform - it is parallel to ec2 and lambda. It does not compete with kubernetes (as can be seen by the eks-on-fargate offering).

There is probably some tension between ECS and k8s - AWS built a container orchestration platform based on what they think the world (and Amazon) needs and then k8s became madly popular. And it's not clear that AWS was wrong because k8s is essentially too complex for many use cases. It makes total sense that they would support both fully.

Vanilla K8s is not meant to be directly used by everyone. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqQTEdHVaCw for insight on how K8s team expect the project to move forward. Frameworks like OpenDeis and Knative are meant to be used by developers.

IMO K8s will become akin to Linux Kernel. Almost no one uses bare mainline Linux kernels, you choose a distro based on your needs. Companies like RedHat and Canonical will pop up and provide their own packaged "distros" of K8s and you will choose which philosophy best suits your needs.

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