Amazon Web Services Inc. today launched its ECS Anywhere tool into general availability to make it easier, as well as less expensive, for companies to manage the software containers they run on-premises.

ECS Anywhere is part of the cloud giant’s Amazon Elastic Container Service. The latter offering provides a set of tools for managing containerized applications hosted on AWS infrastructure. Administrators can use Elastic Container Service to perform tasks such as creating and deleting containers, monitoring their performance and recovering workloads after technical issues.

Elastic Container Service can be used to manage containers across both AWS’ public cloud infrastructure and its AWS Outposts hybrid cloud appliances, which customers deploy on-premises. ECS Anywhere, the tool that launched into general availability today, extends support to on-premises systems that aren’t supplied by AWS.

There are several situations where a company may wish to run containers both in the cloud and on traditional in-house infrastructure. Some organizations have unused hardware in their data centers that can provide a low-cost means of hosting containerized applications.

For others, the main consideration is latency: Certain workloads, such as factory analytics applications, need to run in close physical proximity to the systems generating the data they analyze. This often means they have to be deployed on servers located inside the factory.

AWS says that ECS Anywhere makes such environments more efficient. Normally, companies have to use separate orchestration platforms to manage their cloud-based and on-premises container clusters, which increases operational complexity. There’s also the matter of cost: Deploying an extra orchestration product to manage the on-premises deployment often incurs additional software licensing expenses. 

With ECS Anywhere, AWS customers can use Elastic Container Service to manage both their cloud and their on-premises container clusters. The Amazon.com Inc. unit says that reduces work for administrators by eliminating the maintenance overhead involved in running a separate on-premises container orchestration system. ECS Anywhere is also easier to connect to administrators’ other management tools, since it uses the same application programming interfaces as Elastic Container Service. 

ECS Anywhere can manage containers on both Intel Corp. and Arm-based servers. AWS says there’s support for more than a half-dozen Linux distributions at launch. 

“Customers have told us that while they need to run containers on their own infrastructure, they don’t want the hassle of operating their own cluster management software,” said Deepak Singh, AWS’ vice president of compute services. AWS disclosed today that over 100,000 customers have adopted Elastic Container Service to date.

One of those customers, Siemens AG, uses the service with ECS Anywhere to power manufacturing analytics use cases. “Our team expects to use Amazon ECS Anywhere by our customers to manage the factory floors in the next one to two years, which will allow our end customer to get real-time insights into their factory floors,” said Dan Hoz, the general manager of Siemens’s Valor manufacturing software business. 

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