The container-focused announcements from Amazon Web Services Inc. today contained one very important word: anywhere.

The cloud provider announced Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere as new hybrid container capabilities that can be run on-premises and in the cloud. While EKS is Kubernetes-specific and ECS handles general container orchestration, the most recent news from AWS recognizes that customers want the best of both cloud and on-prem worlds.

“Most of them, once they start running EKS realize that we have a really nice operational posture,” said Deepak Singh (pictured), vice president of compute services at AWS. “It’s very reliable, and it scales. They want to bring that same operational posture on-prem.”

Singh spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed a newly announced container automation service and rising customer interest in serverless solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Self-service for developers

AWS added further depth to its container-based offerings with the public preview of AWS Proton, a new service to automate container and serverless application development and deployment. The concept behind the latest release is to allow platform teams to create a stack with elements needed to provision a service, such as infrastructure as code, continuous delivery or observability, while unburdening developers.

“It gives them a single framework where they can deploy these, and then developers can come and do self-service,” Singh explained. “The biggest benefit to developers is they don’t have to become an expert in every single technology out there. They can focus on writing application code.”

Proton’s support of serverless application development pointed toward one interesting trend within AWS, which was confirmed by Singh. Customers are increasingly choosing AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with both EKS and ECS.

“Almost half of the new container customers that we have on AWS in 2020 have chosen Fargate serverless containers,” Singh said. “They’re not picking ECS or EKS and running in EC2; they’re running on Fargate.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE