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AWS continues to garner awards and accolades from all major players in the industry.

After being recognized as a Leader in the
Gartner Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant
, AWS has become a
Forrester New Wave™ Enterprise Public Cloud Leader for Container Platforms for the
ninth consecutive year.

“With a wide range of fully managed, serverless Kubernetes consumption options, and the majority of containers deployed directly in its cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to innovate and deeply integrate its container platform with its core security and networking capabilities.” – Forrester

AWS offers resources optimized for running containers, along with a set of orchestration services that make it easy to build and run containerized applications in production. In this report, Forrester identifies and evaluates the 7 most significant platforms in this category and evaluates them based on 10 criteria on which AWS has been able to stand out.

But it is necessary to take a step back, fully understanding what Containers are and what are the opportunities and challenges related to them.

Containers are changing the world of developing and deploying applications on servers: this model makes it possible to speed up the time of implementation of applications and guarantees greater flexibility and security, but also presents new problems that companies must face.

Virtual machines abstract the concept of hardware and make it possible to run multiple operating systems on the same machine.

Containers, on the other hand, abstract the concept of the operating system and thus create a new “layer” of abstraction into which libraries, executables, and other components of the operating system are moved.

This makes the application independent of the operating system on which it runs, making it possible, for example, to run multiple copies of it without them being in contact with each other.

On the other hand, containers do not allow the same level of security as virtual machines and for this reason there are dedicated solutions, such as
AWS Fargate
, which among other things guarantees the separation of containers by confining them to dedicated virtual machines. Containers are controlled by software, called
an orchestrator
, which is responsible for managing and coordinating the various containers that are running.

The introduction of containers has simplified the use of the DevOps method, where the boundary between developers and systems engineers blurs to the point of vanishing: the management of development and deployment of projects becomes integrated and allows new software releases to be made faster and more continuously, with incremental improvements.

The challenge for companies in this context is to review the development and project management process, but when they manage to complete this step, the opportunities that open up to them are considerable: thanks to the container model, it is possible to obtain greater flexibility and greater ability to respond to the specific needs of the company.

This is because containers have much shorter launch and response times than virtual machines: thanks to the intrinsic characteristics of this model, it takes very little time to launch a container and to respond to requests.

AWS Fargate is a further simplification compared to the “classic” container model: Fargate allows, in fact, to take care only of your container, delegating to AWS the configuration and maintenance of the underlying platform.

This allows companies to reap the full benefits of the container model without having to deal with the underlying technical details, which are often the ones that involve the biggest hassle and expense. It is, in effect, an application of the serverless model in the context of containers.

“The main benefits of Fargate are many. First of all, it allows you not to have to manage the computational infrastructure necessary to run the containers, thus reducing management costs”, says Massimo Re Ferrè, Principal Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. “Secondly, Fargate allows you to run an ECS task or EKS pod in a dedicated way on a single managed VM instance.

This makes it possible to increase the degree of security by mitigating the problem of “container escapes”, i.e. the possibility that an application running in a container takes possession of the host and other containers running on the same host. Fargate is also orchestrator-agnostic and can be used by both
Amazon ECS
and
Amazon EKS
users.”

However, this great flexibility and scalability also leads to a problem of controlling expenses.

VMEngine, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner in Italy
, has been able to migrate several companies to AWS containers in the last year, maintaining the same operations and generating significant savings.

This is an exceptional result in all respects that shows how a well-made configuration designed specifically for the system on which it is based can guarantee significant savings compared to traditional solutions.

However, companies do not always take into account the differences between the various billing models and this leads them to spend more; In these cases, it is advisable to rely on the advice of experts with whom to establish the right migration strategy.

AWS’s offering includes two orchestrators: on the one hand, there is EKS , which offers an upstream implementation of Kubernetes that is compatible with all vendors that offer Kubernetes; on the other hand, there’s ECS, with an implementation of an orchestrator created by Amazon with links to other of the company’s services.

Both solutions are compatible with Fargate, EKS is the best option in case you prefer Kubernetes, while ECS is the best choice for workloads in Doker.

“For some customers, native application integration with other AWS services is a business priority and an opportunity to reduce management costs. These customers typically choose Amazon ECS, a fully managed service that is natively integrated with other AWS services. Other customers have special needs such as the need to configure container orchestration in a unique way by taking advantage of a vast open source ecosystem of add-on solutions. These customers typically choose Amazon EKS, a managed service built on top of Kubernetes and compatible with the ecosystem itself. The portability of the applications is mainly guaranteed by the container format in the first place, and secondly by the orchestrator used.”

Finally, in news just a few days ago,
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teamed up with Docker
to create “an integrated, frictionless experience” that allows developers to move from containers running in an on-premises Docker Desktop environment to Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) quickly and easily.

Developers can now use Docker Compose, Docker Desktop , and Docker Hub to deploy applications on Amazon ECS and the AWS Fargate serverless compute engine. This new feature simplifies the process of deploying and managing containers on AWS from an on-premises development environment running Docker.

Previously, taking a local Docker Compose file and running it on Amazon ECS was a challenge due to constructs in Amazon ECS that were not part of the Docker Compose specification, the company explained in a statement, but were required for the application to run on AWS.

Docker and AWS have worked together to create a streamlined workflow that allows developers to quickly and easily switch between containers running in an on-premises Docker Desktop environment and Amazon ECS. This provides developers with an easy path to running highly secure and scalable production applications on Amazon ECS.

“This is a big step in giving developers the best experience of building, sharing, and running cloud-native apps with Docker and Amazon ECS,” said Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. “This experience allows developers to work locally and bring the same experience to a production-scale cloud service with Amazon ECS, reducing the scope of knowledge needed and speeding up their time to production.”