Cloud computing and containers go hand-in-hand.

The mobility associated with the cloud is based on the ability for applications to run consistently across different environments. And containers make it possible to develop, maintain and troubleshoot apps in an isolated environment, reducing overall downtime and increasing security and portability.

“It’s the right way to build applications in the modern era,” said Deepak Singh (pictured, left), vice president of compute services at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Singh and Abby Fuller (right), principal technologist for containers and Linux at AWS, spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference last week in Las Vegas. They discussed serverless container news and how Fargate, AWS’ serverless compute engine for containers, is addressing the challenges.

Upping the Fargate ante

As the battle for container services heats up, AWS is upping its already strong game. New services across the portfolio were announced both during and before re:Invent, including upgrades to Fargate.

“Fargate serves as a runtime compute engine for containers, and you can pick your scheduler on top of it and go make hay with your applications,” Singh said. “[It’s] a cloud-native natural way to run containers.”

The big announcement was Fargate for EKS, which “got a good cheer in the keynote,” Miniman said. The tool simplifies running Kubernetes pods on Fargate, according to Singh.

“Folks love Kubernetes as a tool and as a community, but it can be a pretty significant lift operationally,” he said. “With Fargate [for EKS], they can use APIs that they want or the open-source tooling that they want, but they don’t have to worry about provisioning and managing that EC2 capacity.”

The potential to save big was announced with the Fargate Spot deployment option. Fargate Spot allows fault-tolerant apps to run on spare Fargate capacity, giving a discount of up to a 70% off standard Fargate pricing, according to Fuller.

Other announcements included an automated vulnerability assessment feature, called Image Scanning for Elastic Container Registry. And at re:Invent, she said, AWS launched capacity providers for ECS, which “lets you split your traffic between on-demand and spot instances in the same cluster.”

Making app development and management simpler has been a focus for the AWS compute and containers teams. “We’ve spent a lot of time looking at things like patterns and abstractions that help make these workflows easier for developers,” Fuller said. “It’s about … being able to mix and match and to focus my energy where I really get benefit from customizing, rather than having to do the whole thing from the ground up.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: SiliconANGLE