Amazon takes you anywhere, EKS Anywhere, with Dell Technologies

With this post, my aim is to give you some insight into our recent partnerships with Amazon that sees Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) experience being brought from the public cloud, right into your data centre, with Dell Technologies infrastructure. But before we start looking at the ins and outs of Amazon’s EKS Anywhere offering, let’s first take a look at containers and container orchestration.

Containers

Microservices and microservices architecture are now the go-to standard for developing modern software. Microservices are where applications and components of a solution are loosely coupled – so if one component goes down, the remaining components can go about their day without being impacted.

Containers are built on microservices architecture – with containers providing a standard way of bundling together an application’s code and dependencies into a single object or package.

They are isolated, with multiple containers sharing the same Host OS and if required, can also share bins/libraries.  

As an example, you can have multiple containers on a single host, all of which will have their own package of code while sharing the same OS. 

Figure 1. Multiple containers sharing one OS

Sharing this OS means that containers are much more efficient than hypervisors when it comes to system resources, as they do not include operating system images. Virtual machines and containers can do many of the same things, but VMs take more time to create, configure, ship, and run. The advantage of a container is that it is much faster and more lightweight – and this makes them very attractive to anyone wanting to run containers on-prem or in the public cloud.

Containers offer the following benefits:

• Everything in a single package: One package will contain everything that an application will need to run - so all its dependencies, binaries and libraries will be in there
• Repeatability: A container will run the same on a laptop, in the data centre or in the public cloud
• Lightweight and portable: Applications in containers can be deployed, patched and destroyed easily.
• Less overhead: Containers don’t include operating system images and require less system resources than traditional or hardware virtual machine environments
• Better application development: By compartmentalising the application components, DevOps teams can work on smaller, more manageable projects to accelerate development, test and production cycles.

Container orchestration

Containers are faster and easier to run than VMs and make far more efficient use of computing hardware – so containers are great for Cloud Service Providers who must ensure they optimise their hardware to maximise profitability – and they also work great for on-prem environments.

But the thing is…creating and managing containers is not easy and so customers need excellent container orchestration tools to deploy, scale, manage and lifecycle manage their containerised applications.

There is a fair amount of choice out there when it comes to container orchestration tools, and with Amazon’s EKS Anywhere, Kubernetes has been the orchestration tool of choice for this offering.

Okay so...what is EKS Anywhere?

Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) Anywhere is a managed Kubernetes service offering from Amazon which allows you to easily create and manage Kubernetes clusters on customer-managed infrastructure, so that’s on-prem folks – with complete lifecycle management of multiple Kubernetes clusters being possible. 

It works on the same premise as Amazon’s EKS Distro which runs Kubernetes clusters in the AWS public cloud, and so EKS Anywhere makes it ideal for customers who wish to run containerised applications both in their data centre and in the public cloud. This way you can get that same consistent operational experience with the option of viewing and managing the clusters in Amazon’s EKS console.. 

Note: The EKS console is hosted on AWS but there is no requirement to integrate or connect to the EKS console to manage your on-prem clusters.

Figure 2. Amazon EKS Anywhere

This solution allows customers to use Amazon’s EKS software within their own data centres who may...

• already have on-prem infrastructure that they would like to modernize
• or they would like to keep data on-prem for security or compliance reasons
• or maybe they see a lower TCO for on-prem when comparing to their projected TCO in the public cloud.

EKS Anywhere enables customers to stand up Kubernetes clusters on-premises using VMware’s vSphere, CloudStack or they can also opt for a bare metal platform set-up. 

When running Kubernetes in virtualised environments, flexibility is offered through live migrations, dynamic scaling and hardware abstractions for the operating system. For bare metal, EKS Anywhere will run directly on the hardware without any virtualisation – and this allows workloads to take full advantage of the servers themselves with native I/O speeds, local storage and compute accelerators. 

EKS Anywhere is an open-source software that can be downloaded, for free, and installed on your new or existing hardware on-prem. So no licensing costs.

You do not need upfront commits to use EKS Anywhere, though it does make sense to avail of AWS support to help you along the way – with a requirement from AWS that Support subscriptions are purchased for production EKS Anywhere clusters.

Deploying EKS Anywhere to integrate Kubernetes into your environment is much easier and more reliable than cobbling together your own self-managed Kubernetes clusters (Kubernetes is also open-source and free!) - with EKS Anywhere ensuring your Kubernetes environment is up-to-date and patched.

                                     

Figure 3. Amazon EKS Anywhere - On-premises & public cloud (AWS)

So, where does Dell Technologies come into this? With their enterprise-grade hardware of course!

Dell Technologies Hardware

Amazon's EKS Anywhere supports block, file, vVols or vSAN storage and as I mentioned earlier it can be run on virtualized or bare-metal infrastructure (see AWS list of bare-metal validated hardware here). For Dell technologies hardware, it has been validated on three of Dell EMC’s major platforms; PowerFlex, PowerStore and VxRail – all of which can be acquired through our traditional purchasing channels or via Dell’s APEX (as-a-service) offerings. 

Below you will find a brief overview of each of these Dell Technologies platforms and what the architecture looks like when they are paired together with EKS Anywhere.

PowerFlex

Previously branded as Dell’s ScaleIO, PowerFlex software-defined storage (SDS) is a software-only solution that uses existing servers' local drives and LAN to create a virtual SAN that has all the benefits of external storage. PowerFlex utilizes the existing local storage devices and turns them into shared block storage. It can be deployed on-prem or in AWS public cloud (PowerFlex Cloud Storage in AWS).

PowerFlex is bundled with Dell commodity computing servers (PowerFlex solutions with hardware officially called VxFlex Ready Nodes, PowerFlex appliance, and PowerFlex rack), and PowerFlex can scale from three compute/storage nodes to over 2,000 nodes with up to 240 million IOPS of performance achieved. 

The below diagrams provide an overview of a typical architecture you will see for a virtual and bare metal environment. 

Figure 4. EKS Anywhere on Dell EMC PowerFlex (virtual)

Figure 5. EKS Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex (Bare Metal)

With this PowerFlex validation, EKS Anywhere with PowerFlex is extended from a virtualized use case to bare-metal environments, with Dell's unique PowerFlex Cloud Storage Interface (CSI) plugin being used to enable containerised applications of Kubernetes clusters to use block storage. 

PowerStore

Powerstore is a Dell EMC purpose-built storage appliance that uses container-based microservices architecture, advanced storage technologies, and integrated machine learning to maximise the power of your data.

PowerStore models can scale up and out in intelligent clusters – with always-on intelligent data reduction providing a 4:1 DRR guarantee, CloudIQ support and future-proof Anytime Upgrade™ program options.

Below, you can see a typical PowerStore and EKS Anywhere solution.

Figure 6. EKS Anywhere on Dell EMC PowerStore

PowerStore's capabilities make it another ideal Dell Technologies platform for use with EKS Anywhere and containerized applications and services.

VxRail

Then we have VxRail - this is a hyper-converged appliance that has compute, networking, storage and virtualization on a single device with full lifecycle management. VxRail is another Dell product that is deeply integrated with VMware's vSphere and it is the only jointly engineered hyperconverged system with VMware that is out there right now. 

For VxRail, we have two validated options for EKS Anywhere, both leveraging VMware's default CNS/CSI drivers to enable their storage to be used as a platform to run Kubernetes workloads. 

• VxRail with vSAN for persistent block and file storage
• VxRail Dynamic nodes with external storage array

Running EKS Anywhere on VxRail delivers full lifecycle management keeping VxRail in a continuously validated state with the Kubernetes platforms being updated regularly with EKS Anywhere. 

Figure 7. EKS Anywhere on Dell EMC VxRail (using vSAN)

Figure 8. EKS Anywhere on VxRail Dynamic nodes with PowerStore

Pairing EKS Anywhere with VxRail delivers offers a seamless, automated and consistent operation of your workloads whether on-prem or in the cloud. 

Primary benefits of EKS Anywhere:

• Simplify on-premises Kubernetes management with default component configurations and automated cluster management tools
• Manage your own infrastructure to reduce support costs and avoid maintaining redundant open-source and third-party tools
• Maintain an on-premises environment that’s more reliable than self-managed Kubernetes offerings

With these partnerships between Amazon and Dell Technologies, you can enjoy incredible compute performance, storage flexibility and consistent ground-to-cloud operational experience, along with the ease of operations of whichever on-prem Dell infrastructure you choose. 

#IWORK4DELL

Opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own and may not be representative of the views of Dell Technologies.