Amazon Web Services Inc. today caught up with its rivals Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., announcing general availability of its managed Kubernetes service for managing software containers.

Software containers have become a vital part of the application development infrastructure landscape, because they give developers a way to build their apps once and run them on any platform. Kubernetes is an open-source tools that’s used to orchestrate container deployments and make them easier to run.

Amazon announced its AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes last year at its re:Invent conference, billing it as “a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to use Kubernetes on AWS without having to be an expert in managing Kubernetes clusters.”

However, the company was forced to hold off on announcing general availability while it underwent a certification process by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which leads Kubernetes’ development. Now that process has been completed, AWS has its own managed Kubernetes offering to match those already available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Google’s Cloud Platform.

Amazon EKS is not to be confused with “Amazon ECS,” which stands for the Amazon Elastic Container Service and can be thought of as a “Docker-as-a service” platform. Where ECS removes the manual efforts to building docker hosts, EKS does more by extracting an additional layer of scheduling and clustering provided by Kubernetes to a container environment.

Despite being late to the managed-Kubernetes party, Amazon doesn’t seem to be too concerned that it might lose ground on its rivals. The company cited CNCF data in a press release that shows 57 percent of all Kubernetes users are already running it on AWS, compared with 33 percent on Google’s cloud, and 16 percent on Microsoft’s. Amazon said those numbers exceed 100 percent because many users run Kubernetes deployments on multiple cloud platforms.

“This is another data point that shows Kubernetes really has won the container management platform war,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., about the launch.

Amazon also announced a host of partnerships to coincide with the launch of EKS. The company is teaming up with startup Heptio Inc. on identity and access management for EKS, while Alcide and Twistlock Inc. are partnering to provide security solutions for the new service. AWS is also supporting HashiCorp’s Terraform and Vault offerings for managing the EKS infrastructure more easily and efficiently.

“It’s good to see also that AWS supports HashiCorp’s offerings to manage the infrastructure better and easier and in a more efficient way,” Mueller said. “Chief executive officers who are building next-generation applications can now fully run kubernetes loads on AWS in production, which is another a major milestone.”

Meanwhile, Codefresh is working with Amazon to provide continuous integration and delivery capabilities for Amazon EKS. Previously, cloud-native storage company Portworx Inc. said it was teaming up with Amazon to offer persistent storage for EKS users.

Amazon said EKS is being made available today in its U.S. East and U.S. West regions, with wider availability in more regions on the way. The company will also announce new features on EKS later this year, most likely during its re:Invent 2018 conference.

Image: Amazon