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.
* People running compute on AWS, but content distribution on their own hardware co-located at ISPs, those CDN nodes need to have the software running on them managed, and I can see the appeal of doing so with the same control plane everything else uses.
* Organisations running heavily distributed compute, either for the purposes of latency or resilience. Many large retail chains have small remote nodes running the PoS systems at each site so that they can continue making sales and tracking inventory in the case of a central outage. Again, seems like it would be nice to just treat those nodes as an extension of the central servers on AWS.
* (Somewhat more dubiously) IoT providers. AWS have a couple of services which are much better suited to managing IoT devices, but I could see some arguments for treating an IoT hub as a k8s node and just deploying new containers to it when updating.
Same - locally no one wants to run the admin plane, but folks are happy to see some beefy machines in their AWS account.
Problem is usually if data is in AWS, you want compute locally - the on prem has the bandwidth charges so need to be careful there.