DevOps is a technological function that more and more companies are relying on these days.

As the market for its ancillary products, like cloud-native infrastructures, has grown, so has the palpable demand for support systems like container deployment services. It was in recognizing this demand early that Amazon Elastic Container Service was created in 2014.

“Our customers have always been appreciative of the value and the simplicity of ECS for many years now,” said Massimo Re Ferre (pictured), principal technologist at Amazon Web Services Inc. “I mean, we launched ECS back in 2014 and we have seen great adoption of the product. And customers have always appreciated the fact that it was easy to operate and easy to use.”

Re Ferre also spoke about the extenuating problems that drove the company to establish Outpost, a full-fledged cloud management infrastructure that users can deploy on their own servers.

“Many of our customers wanted to go all-in on the cloud, but they did have these exceptions that they needed to deal with, with applications that cannot move to the cloud.”

Re Ferre spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during DockerCon. They discussed the current cloud native development landscape and how ECS is doing its part to improve the evolution of cloud computing, the overall experience for developers and engineers, and the quality of new-age cloud-developed software and mobile applications. (* Disclosure below.)

A timeline of development

Amazon.com Inc. got into the cloud computing game in 2006. What we know nowadays as cloud computing was — at the time — IT infrastructure simply offered as web services. The company has grown since then and now accounts for about 33% of the global cloud infrastructure services niche, according to Re Ferre.

ECS launched in 2014 and, with its subsequent updates, began to accommodate support for Docker integration. The product, which was designed to allow customers to manage and scale complex containers, has seen success among enterprise users, brands and businesses.

In 2020, AWS followed up by announcing ECS Anywhere. Slated to roll out in 2021, it is an update to the service that lets users deploy native Amazon ECS tasks in any environment. These can vary from all forms of customer-managed environments to traditional AWS infrastructure.

ECS and Docker

This year’s DockerCon is focused on the developer experience and productivity. And, according to Re Ferre, ECS has been designed with a suite of features that place expedience and ease of use at the forefront.

“Take the fact that a developer would previously need to author many hundred lines of confirmation templates to be able to take their application and deploy it into the cloud. What they need to do now is alter a new file, a YAML file with a very clear and easy-to-use Docker Compose syntax, compose up and deploy out to … AWS and using ECS Fargate and many other AWS services in the backend,” said Re Ferre while giving a sneak peek of new features coming to the service.

Re Ferre also weighed in on a number of developments at AWS, including new advances in the internet of things, distributed technologies with edge, and other machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies for the future.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE