AWS announces support for serverless containers on Kubernetes

Cloud giant weighs in to support Virtual Kubelet project originally kicked off by Microsoft

Ahead of the Linux Foundation's Kubernetes and CloudNative Conference in Copenhagen this week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its Fargate container service will now support Virtual Kubelet.

Virtual Kubelet is an open source project originally started by Microsoft that makes it easier to run serverless containers such as Azure Container Instances (ACI) using the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

According to one of its developers Brendan Burns, "the Virtual Kubelet project at its core is an effort to bridge the gaps between serverless containers and the Kubernetes API."

It works by implementing a virtual node in a Kubernetes cluster, Burns says.

"This virtual node represents the serverless container infrastructure making the Kubernetes scheduler aware of the fact that it can schedule containers onto the serverless container APIs."

The initial effort was open-sourced and the Virtual Kubelet project is now hosted on Github.

AWS Fargate is a service based on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) that was launched at the end of last year. It allows users to run containers such as Docker without the need to manage servers or clusters - those tasks are abstracted away.

As well simplifying the running of containerised applications, the company claims it also makes them easier to scale, and usage is billed by the second according to CPU and memory used while the containerised applications are running.

Integration with the Virtual Kubelet agent takes the form of a new plugin written by AWS allowing it to create Fargate tasks. This plugin has been merged into the Virtual Kubelet project.

"AWS Fargate Virtual Kubelet provider connects your Kubernetes cluster to a Fargate cluster in AWS. The Fargate cluster is exposed as a virtual node with the CPU and memory capacity that you choose. Pods scheduled on the virtual node run on Fargate like they would run on a standard Kubernetes node," according to the documentation.

Kubernetes, the container orchestration and deployment platform originally developed by Google, has been generating a lot of interest from developers, as it allows them to more easily run cloud-based containerised applications at scale. Computing will be in attendance at KubCon + CloudNativeCon so watch this space for further news coming from the event.