UPDATED 20:22 EDT / AUGUST 17 2020

CLOUD

Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports its Graviton2 Arm processors

Amazon Web Services Inc. said today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event that its Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service is now generally available on its AWS Graviton2 processor.

Amazon EKS provides a fully managed Kubernetes service on AWS infrastructure. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool that’s used to manage large deployments of containers, which in turn host the components of modern software applications.

Graviton2 is an Arm-based chip that was designed by Amazon and its Annapurna Labs chip research unit. The chip hit general availability in May.

Amazon said customers can only use Amazon EKS on Graviton2 in regions where both services are available. There are some advantages to doing so, AWS product developer advocate Michael Hausenblas wrote in a blog post announcing the news.

“AWS Graviton2 processors power Arm-based EC2 instances delivering a major leap in performance and capabilities as well as significant cost savings,” Hausenblas said. “A primary goal of running containers is to improve the cost efficiency for your applications. Combine both and you get a great price performance.”

In a related announcement, Amazon also said that its AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS service now supports Amazon Elastic File System.

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for software containers that works with both Amazon EKS and Amazon Elastic Container Service, which is an alternative fully managed container orchestration service.

Amazon EFS is a regional service that stores data within and across multiple availability zones for high availability and durability. Today’s announcement brings these capabilities to AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS. Amazon previously announced EFS support for Fargate on ECS in April.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that today’s announcements are a big deal because the vast majority of next-generation applications being built today are done so atop Kubernetes.

Regarding Amazon EKS support for Graviton2, he said it should enable more “internet of things” use cases. “This allows enterprises to further extend key code assets beyond the traditional supported platforms, which contributes to the key factor of developer velocity – that is, when the same code can run in more places, developers have more time to actually code,” Mueller said.

As for AWS Fargate’s support for Amazon EKS, Mueller said it’s a key development because containers are generally not very good at managing storage and files.

“The extension to Amazon EFS enables container app developers to access files in Amazon’s file management system,” Mueller said. “This makes it easier to connect next-generation, Kubernetes powered applications to file-based data.”

In a final announcement from Amazon today, the company said it has made some significant machine learning enhancements to its Amazon Personalize service that companies can use to deliver personalized recommendations to their customers. Amazon said the updates can help businesses improve their personalized recommendations by up to 50%, as measured by clickthrough rates.

In addition, the new ML capabilities allow customers to include “completely new products and fresh content” within their recommendations, so that new products and content can be discovered by the appropriate audience. The company said that enables new products to be discovered and purchased by an order of magnitude more quickly than other recommendation systems and delivers a conversion rate of up to 21% in some cases.

Image: AWS

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