Member-only story
Serverless Kubernetes Cluster on AWS with EKS on Fargate
Why it is a game-changer and how to use it
Containerized applications are exponentially growing in popularity. The container technologies (a.o. Kubernetes) are estimated to account for over four billion dollars in market volume in 2022 with a 30 percent year-over-year growth rate measured for the period 2017 to 2022 [6].
One of the most popular platforms to run containers at scale is Kubernetes,
a feature-rich open-source orchestration system that allows automating the entire lifecycle of containers, including application deployment and monitoring their health. Despite all its benefits, Kubernetes can add an additional level of complexity, as it requires dedicated DevOps resources to keep the cluster healthy and ensure that it scales.
AWS proved many times that they are customer-centric and that they want to improve the developer’s experience. With the launch of AWS EKS on Fargate, a serverless Kubernetes service, they proved it again while introducing a service that turned out to be a game-changer with respect to running containerized applications at scale.
The Story Behind Fargate and Kubernetes
Up until recently, there have been many attempts to bring serverless applications to Kubernetes, but most of the frameworks I’ve seen focused on deploying serverless functions (Functions as a Service) to an existing Kubernetes cluster, rather than providing a cloud service that would automatically provision Kubernetes worker nodes (data plane) to run serverless containers.
In December 2019, AWS launched a new service: EKS on Fargate, which provides a serverless data plane for a Kubernetes cluster. In theory, it is not considered a separate service, but rather a mix of two existing ones, EKS (AWS implementation of Kubernetes), and ECS Fargate (serverless AWS-specific container orchestration platform).
Before EKS on Fargate, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) let us enjoy the benefits of Kubernetes, but it still required additional efforts to maintain the data plane, i.e. the worker nodes that are running on Amazon EC2. In contrast, Fargate is completely serverless, it provides an abstraction layer that…
