Improving Containers by Listening to Customers

At AWS, we build our product roadmap based upon feedback from our customers. The following three new features have all come about because customers have asked us to solve specific issues they have face when building and operating sophisticated container-based applications.

Managed Node Groups for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
Our customers have told us that they want to focus on building innovative solutions for their customers, and focus less on the heavy lifting of managing Kubernetes infrastructure.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) already provides you with a standard, highly-available Kubernetes cluster control plane, and now, AWS can also manage the nodes (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances) for your Kubernetes cluster. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) makes it easy to apply bug fixes and security patches to nodes, and update them to the latest Kubernetes versions along with the cluster.

The Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) console and API give you a single place to understand the state of your cluster, you no longer have to jump around different services to see all of the resources that make up your cluster.

You can provision managed nodes today when you create a new EKS cluster. There is no additional cost to use EKS managed node groups, you only pay for the EKS cluster and AWS resources they provision. To find out more check out this blog: Extending the EKS API: Managed Node Groups.

Managing your container Logs with AWS FireLens
Customers building container-based applications told us that they wanted more flexibility when it came to logging; however, they didn’t wish to to install, configure, or troubleshoot logging agents.

AWS FireLens, gives you this flexibility as you can now forward container logs to storage and analytics tools by configuring your task definition in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or AWS Fargate.

This means that developers have their containers send logs to Stdout and then FireLens picks up these logs and forwards them to the destination that has been configured.

FireLens works with the open-source projects Fluent Bit and Fluentd, which means that you can send logs to any destination supported by either of those projects.

There are a lot of configuration options with FireLens, and you can choose to filter logs and even have logs sent to multiple destinations. For more information, you can take a look at the demo I wrote earlier in the week: Announcing Firelens – A New Way to Manage Container Logs.

If’ you would like a deeper understanding of how the technology works and was built, Wesley Pettit goes into even further depth on the Containers Blog in his article: Under the hood: FireLens for Amazon ECS Tasks.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) EventBridge Support
Customers using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) have told us they want to be able to start a build process when new container images are pushed to Elastic Container Registry.

We have therefore added Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) EventBridge support.

Using events that Elastic Container Registry now publishes to EventBridge, you can trigger actions such as starting a pipeline or posting a message to somewhere like Amazon Chime or Slack when your image is successfully pushed.

To learn more about this new feature, check out the following blog post where I give a more detailed explanation and demo: EventBridge support in Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

More to come
These 3 new releases add to other great releases we have already had this year such as Savings Plans, Amazon EKS Windows Containers support, and Native Container Image Scanning in Amazon ECR.

We are still listening, and we need your feedback, so if you have a feature request or a pain point with your container applications, please let us know by creating or commenting on issues in our public containers roadmap. Sometime in the future I might one-day writing about a new feature that was inspired by you.

— Martin