Cloud Field Day is a regular event organized by Tech Field Day, which brings together the best independent thought leaders in the enterprise cloud space. I had the honor to be invited to participate as a Delegate. On Friday, November 8, 2020 the ninth edition of the Cloud Field Day focused on AWS who presented several of their containerization solutions.
AWS offers both the Elastic Kubernetes Service and the Elastic Container Service — the difference between the two can be summed up as simplicity vs flexibility. ECS is the easiest way to run containers on AWS because it is designed by Amazon to take full advantage of AWS native services. EKS, on the other hand, offers certain flexibility by being Kubernetes and running the way Kubernetes is used to running, but it requires an extra layer to interact with some AWS Services.
The AWS presenters drove home the point that they are trying to provide users with the simplest possible cloud service. They want to offer users the opportunity to get started hosting services on the cloud whilst requiring the least amount of knowledge of cloud services. Fargate was developed to close a gap in their offerings. AWS tries to offer a solution for wherever on this graph a customer should find themselves, covering the spectrum of mostly customer-managed, to mostly AWS-managed.
Finally, AWS presented a demo of their AWS Copilot services. Copilot is a Command Line Interface for managing AWS services. It's designed to be super simple, and super opinionated — meaning it takes care of a lot of settings without requiring user-input.
I want to thank Nick Coult, who's sr. manager of product management at AWS, Principal Technologist, Massimo Re Ferrè, and sr product developer advocate, Nathan Peck for their very exciting presentation.
To see more screenshots and commentary check out the Twitter thread we live-tweeted alongside the event, and you can watch the whole presentation as well as all the other CFD9 presentations on YouTube.