Amazon Web Services Inc. today launched Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes, or cdk8s, an open-source development toolkit designed to make Kubernetes clusters easier to build and maintain.

Kubernetes has emerged as the go-to framework for managing software containers in the enterprise. It allows engineers to compose container clusters by defining configuration details in the relatively simple YAML data serialization language.

But YAML, while a popular choice for configuration tasks, lacks most of the advanced features of programming languages such as Python, which makes large-scale Kubernetes clusters difficult to manage. That’s the challenge cdk8s is aimed at addressing.

“YAML is an excellent format for describing the desired state of your cluster, but it does not have primitives for expressing logic and reusable abstractions,” AWS engineers Elad Ben-Israel and Nathan Taber explained in a blog post. 

AWS’ cdk8s toolkit tackles the issue by making it possible to work with framework using the popular TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET programming languages. Using the languages’ advanced features, engineers can write more sophisticated configuration logic than what YAML supports to automate manual tasks. That reduces the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written and, for companies with advanced needs, provides the ability to create multiple “layers” of software logic on top of Kubernetes to abstract its complexity. 

“Higher layers can abstract the complexity of the API (by providing smart defaults for example) or they can represent opinionated ideas that abstract away major details in favor of a simpler mental model,” Ben-Israel and Taber wrote.

Using a programming language instead of YAML also allows engineers to create Kubernetes configuration files leveraging the same tools with which they build their applications. When writing code, they can use an integrated development environment with auto-completion features. Then, once it’s time to deploy a configuration file, they can use their team’s existing continuous integration and continuous delivery tools instead of having to rely on a separate YAML workflow.

Under the hood, cdk8s works by automatically converting code into YAML syntax. Ben-Israel and Taber said that AWS is exploring the possibility of adding the ability to disassemble YAML files back into code with future releases. The cloud giant is also working to add support for additional programming languages and more features to streamline Kubernetes management tasks.

AWS launched cdk8s today alongside a new version CloudTrail, its product for monitoring and auditing enterprise AWS accounts. There’s a now a “one-step quick create process” for creating audit trails plus a new  configuration wizard that allows administrators to customize key settings.

Also on the Kubernetes front today, AWS announced that its Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or EKS is now generally available in its U.S. GovCloud regions. That will enable government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries to use it to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

Photo: AWS