Amazon’s argument for running your containers in its cloud

As part of a slew of announcements made during Amazon Web Service’s Summit in San Francisco today was the general availability of the AWS EC2 Container Service, and with it the company launched a fancy new tool that could make managing containers on the company’s cloud much easier too.

Containers are a hot technology topic in cloud circles nowadays. Lauded for their ease of use and lightweight nature compared to virtual machines, developers can package applications into a container and then move that container around between various hosts – such as a public cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Containers can also scale up or down, and across various infrastructure stacks to hold as much or as little code as needed.

Many of the biggest tech companies have jumped on the container bandwagon, attempting to convince curious users that their platform is the best place to manage containers.

But AWS took a big step forward in its argument today. In addition to announcing the GA of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Container Service, the company also announced a new management dashboard for users to centrally track all of their containers, including how many they have deployed and which users spun them up. AWS will automatically scale containers to fit whatever type of application is placed in them, and if necessary the Container Service will spread the container out over multiple EC2 instances. AWS in the past few months has already launched a repository for storing container images in its cloud.

The moves bring new competition to the container market, specifically for a service that Google launched last year named Kubernetes. Google’s open source container project does many of the same things that AWS’s new services do – but there’s a big difference: Kubernetes is meant to run on customers’ own premises, not just in the cloud.

The container hype is spreading like wildfire across the cloud and AWS wants to be out in front of it. With moves like today, it’s making the argument that it’s cloud can be container-friendly.