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Navigating the Complex Landscape of AWS Container Services

Ryan Gibson — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 12:36:47 +0000

The plethora of container deployment options can overwhelm Amazon Web Services (AWS) ever-evolving ecosystem. This complexity is not just a trivial inconvenience; it’s a significant challenge that developers and companies face when optimizing their applications for the cloud. Understanding the different services AWS offers for container deployment and their advantages and disadvantages is crucial for making informed decisions that align with specific business needs.

An in-depth video (below) by the YouTube Channel Be A Better Dev navigates the complex landscape of AWS container services.

Container Deployment on AWS: A Multitude of Options

AWS provides several container services, each tailored to different requirements and use cases. Here’s a breakdown of the most popular services and their ideal use scenarios:

1. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

If Kubernetes is your choice for container orchestration, Amazon EKS is the go-to service. It offers a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the tasks of setting up, scaling, and managing container applications. EKS is highly scalable and resilient, spreading applications across availability zones to enhance fault tolerance. However, newcomers to Kubernetes might find the initial setup daunting, and the costs can vary significantly based on the resources used.

2. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda can now deploy container images for those operating within the serverless paradigm, allowing code to run in response to events on a fully managed platform. Lambda is particularly cost-effective for applications with variable workloads due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model. However, it imposes a 15-minute maximum execution time, which may not be suitable for long-running applications.

3. AWS Fargate

Fargate is a serverless container compute engine with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon EKS. This service removes the need to manage servers and clusters, making it easier to focus on designing and building applications. Fargate is ideal for applications that require long-running processes and high availability without the operational overhead of managing servers.

4. AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service)

ECS is an end-to-end solution for running a wide range of containerized applications. It supports both Docker containers and now, with Fargate, offers a serverless option to run containers without managing servers or clusters. ECS is highly versatile but comes with a complexity that can be a barrier for users unfamiliar with container orchestration.

5. AWS Lightsail

Lightsail is designed for simpler use cases like small businesses or developers who want to launch a project quickly. It provides a more straightforward and more cost-effective option for running containers, with a setup process that is significantly less complex than ECS or EKS. However, it might not scale as well as other AWS services for more extensive applications.

6. AWS App Runner

App Runner is the newest addition to AWS’s container services, offering an easy way to build and run applications directly from a container image or source code. It is a fully managed service, making it ideal for developers who prefer to focus on their applications rather than infrastructure management.

7. Amazon EC2

While not a container service per se, EC2 allows users to run containers on virtual machines they manage. EC2 offers excellent flexibility and control over containers, making it suitable for custom container orchestration setups. However, it requires a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure management, which can be a significant hurdle for less experienced users.

Choosing the Right Service

The decision to use a particular AWS container service depends on several factors, including the complexity of the application, budget constraints, specific technical requirements, and team expertise. A flowchart or decision tree approach can help clarify the best path forward by considering these variables systematically.

Services to Avoid

While AWS offers a range of powerful tools for container deployment, some services may no longer be the best fit due to newer alternatives that offer improved functionality and ease of use. For instance, Elastic Beanstalk, while versatile, has been somewhat superseded by services like AWS App Runner, which offers similar capabilities but with greater simplicity and lower cost.

Conclusion

As containers continue to be a critical part of cloud infrastructure, understanding the nuances of each AWS service is vital to deploying efficient, resilient, and cost-effective applications. Whether your application requires the robustness of Kubernetes with EKS, the simplicity of App Runner, or the power of EC2, AWS provides various solutions to meet the diverse needs of modern software development. Making informed choices about container deployment will ensure that your applications are performant and aligned with your strategic business goals.

Kubernetes Continues to Evolve in the Container Orchestration Space

Staff — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 17:59:30 +0000

Kubernetes continues to evolve rapidly with ongoing innovations and advancements in the container orchestration space. Here are some of the latest innovations and trends related to Kubernetes:

Kubernetes Service Meshes: Service meshes such as Istio, Linkerd, and Consul are gaining popularity for managing microservices communication within Kubernetes clusters. These tools provide features like traffic management, observability, and security without requiring changes to application code.
Serverless Kubernetes: Serverless frameworks like Knative and KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Autoscaling) enable auto-scaling of containerized workloads and provide a serverless experience on Kubernetes, allowing developers to focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management.
GitOps: GitOps practices are becoming more prevalent for managing Kubernetes clusters and applications. GitOps leverages Git repositories as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application definitions, allowing for automated deployments, rollbacks, and versioning.
Multi-Cluster Management: As organizations adopt Kubernetes at scale, managing multiple clusters across different environments (e.g., on-premises, cloud, edge) becomes crucial. Tools like Rancher, VMware Tanzu, and Google Anthos enable centralized management, monitoring, and governance of distributed Kubernetes deployments.
Kubernetes-native Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery (CD) platforms like Argo CD and Flux CD are designed specifically for Kubernetes environments. They automate the deployment of application changes based on Git repository updates, ensuring consistent and auditable application deployments.
Kubernetes Operators: Operators extend Kubernetes’ capabilities to manage complex, stateful applications. They encapsulate operational knowledge into software, automating tasks like provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. The Operator Framework and Operator Hub provide a framework and repository for sharing and discovering Kubernetes Operators.
Container Runtime Innovation: While Docker remains a popular container runtime, alternatives like containerd, CRI-O, and Kata Containers are gaining traction for their lightweight footprint, improved security, and better integration with Kubernetes.
Edge Computing with Kubernetes: Kubernetes is increasingly being used for edge computing scenarios where resources are distributed across geographically dispersed locations. Projects like K3s, OpenYurt, and KubeEdge provide lightweight Kubernetes distributions optimized for edge deployments, enabling consistent application management across edge and cloud environments.
Security Enhancements: Kubernetes security continues to evolve with features like PodSecurityPolicies, Network Policies, and Runtime Security. Projects such as Falco and OPA (Open Policy Agent) help enforce security policies and detect anomalous behavior within Kubernetes clusters.
Ecosystem Growth: The Kubernetes ecosystem continues to expand with a rich ecosystem of third-party tools, libraries, and integrations aimed at simplifying Kubernetes adoption, enhancing developer productivity, and addressing various operational challenges.

These are just a few examples of the latest innovations and trends in the Kubernetes ecosystem. As Kubernetes adoption continues to grow, we can expect further advancements and enhancements in various areas of container orchestration, management, and deployment.

Google Cloud Fixes Kubernetes Security Flaw

Staff — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:46:16 +0000

Google Cloud has fixed a flaw impacting Kubernetes that could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges.

According to TheHackerNews, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered the flaw and reported it via Google’s Vulnerability Reward Program. Google detailed the issue in a security bulletin:

An attacker who has compromised the Fluent Bit logging container could combine that access with high privileges required by Anthos Service Mesh (on clusters that have enabled it) to escalate privileges in the cluster. The issues with Fluent Bit and Anthos Service Mesh have been mitigated and fixes are now available. These vulnerabilities are not exploitable on their own in GKE and require an initial compromise. We are not aware of any instances of exploitation of these vulnerabilities.

Google recommends manually upgrading GKE to ensure customers are running the patched version:

The following versions of GKE have been updated with code to fix these vulnerabilities in Fluent Bit and for users of managed Anthos Service Mesh. For security purposes, even if you have node auto-upgrade enabled, we recommend that you manually upgrade your cluster and node pools to one of the following GKE versions or later:

1.25.16-gke.1020000

1.26.10-gke.1235000

1.27.7-gke.1293000

1.28.4-gke.1083000

Microsoft Azure Linux Containers for AKS Now Available

Staff — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:49:10 +0000

Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Azure Linux for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Microsoft first announced a preview of Azure Linux containers in October 2022. Jim Perrin, Linux Systems Group Principle Program Manger Lead, announced the general release in a blog post.

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The Azure Linux container host for AKS is a lightweight, secure, and reliable OS platform optimized for performance on Azure. With this platform, you can easily deploy and manage your container workloads using the same proven tooling used by many of Microsoft’s own services. This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview. Your insight and feedback helped to shape the product and ensure it’s ready for production workloads.

Getting started with the Azure Linux container host is as easy as changing the OSSku parameter in your ARM template or other deployment tooling. For more information or to get started check out our documentation.

Perrin says emphasized the platform’s security and reliability .

Our goal is to provide a secure and reliable platform to run your workloads. Towards this end, all updates to the Azure Linux container host are first run through a rigorous suite of Azure validation tests. This suite of tests is kept constantly updated as support for new scenarios is added. Additionally, since there are far fewer packages in the container host, the volume of required security patching is lower, and these issues are patched promptly as well. We closely monitor and fully curate the software supply chain, which enables a greater assurance of quality and resilience end to end.

ISVs and vendors looking to partner with Microsoft can reach out to the company via azurelinuxisv@microsoft.com.

96% of Third-Party Cloud Container Apps Have Known Vulnerabilities

Matt Milano — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 02:01:35 +0000

A whopping 96% of third-party cloud container apps have known vulnerabilities, highlighting ongoing cloud security challenges.

Cloud computing is often touted as more secure than traditional options. Unfortunately, this is only true if all parties involved make security a prime objective.

According to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team, some 96% of third-party container apps have known vulnerabilities. In addition, 63% of third-party code templates contain insecure configurations.

The news is especially concerning given the rise of supply chain attacks. Hackers are increasingly targeting widely used, third-party software, services, containers and plugins. Successfully compromising a single vendor who’s product is used by thousands of customers can have a far greater impact than compromising a single target.

Unit 42 highlights the danger of supply chain cloud attacks:

In most supply chain attacks, an attacker compromises a vendor and inserts malicious code in software used by customers. Cloud infrastructure can fall prey to a similar approach in which unvetted third-party code could introduce security flaws and give attackers access to sensitive data in the cloud environment. Additionally, unless organizations verify sources, third-party code can come from anyone, including an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

Organizations that want to stay secure must start making DevOps security a priority:

Teams continue to neglect DevOps security, due in part to lack of attention to supply chain threats. Cloud native applications have a long chain of dependencies, and those dependencies have dependences of their own. DevOps and security teams need to gain visibility into the bill of materials in every cloud workload in order to evaluate risk at every stage of the dependency chain and establish guardrails.

AWS Using Bottlerocket Linux For Container Hosting

Matt Milano — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 22:42:16 +0000

AWS has revealed that Bottlerocket Linux is the operating system (OS) it is using for container hosting.

Containers are packages containing all the apps, code, libraries and dependencies necessary to run. Containers can be easily moved from one host to another, without worrying about the underlying OS and environment. Containers can also be managed to prevent any one app or process from hogging a system’s resources, making them the ideal way to scale cloud, hosting and IT systems.

Bottlerocket is a new Linux distribution that AWS designed and optimized specifically to work with containers.

“Bottlerocket reflects much of what we have learned over the years,” writes Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS. “It includes only the packages that are needed to make it a great container host, and integrates with existing container orchestrators. It supports Docker image and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format.

“Instead of a package update system, Bottlerocket uses a simple, image-based model that allows for a rapid & complete rollback if necessary. This removes opportunities for conflicts and breakage, and makes it easier for you to apply fleet-wide updates with confidence using orchestrators such as EKS.

“In addition to the minimal package set, Bottlerocket uses a file system that is primarily read-only, and that is integrity-checked at boot time via dm-verity. SSH access is discouraged, and is available only as part of a separate admin container that you can enable on an as-needed basis and then use for troubleshooting purposes.”

AWS is launching a public preview of the OS and inviting others to try it.

Red Hat OpenShift Comes to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Staff — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Despite competing in some markets, Red Hat and Oracle are expanding their alliance to bring Red Hat OpenShift to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Red Hat bills OpenShift as “the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications.”

The collaboration will see Red Hat OpenShift available on both OCI Compute virtual machines and bare metal. Customers have the assurance that Red Hat OpenShift on OCI is a solution that is “tested, certified, and supported by both Oracle and Red Hat.”

The certification and support for Red Hat OpenShift on OCI will build on the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI as a supported operating system that was announced in January 2023. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also certified to support workloads on OCI bare metal servers and Oracle VMware Cloud Solution, in addition to OCI flexible virtual machines, with Red Hat OpenShift certification to follow at general availability. Furthermore, customers can now use Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder, available as part of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, to create customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux gold images for OCI to accommodate a wide range of application workloads and security compliance requirements.

“With today’s announcement, Red Hat and Oracle continue to deliver on our efforts to extend customer choice and flexibility on OCI to our large, global customer base,” said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer, Red Hat. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on OCI offer customers the power to build, deploy, and manage enterprise applications on OCI at scale for faster results and with easier manageability, equipping them with the flexibility to choose their level of control and security based on business needs.”

“Enterprises are migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to take advantage of the platform’s highly performant, secure, and low-cost services,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Fully certifying and supporting Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will enable Red Hat OpenShift customers to simply and easily run their workloads anywhere in the world on OCI’s distributed cloud.”