AWS competencies: what you need to know as a Kubernetes user

Moving to AWS EKS? You’re not alone

The rise of Kubernetes has been meteoric, but with it comes a famously complex set of challenges. 

Businesses like yours are increasingly turning to cloud computing vendors like AWS to host their Kubernetes clusters, whether through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or traditional EC2 instances. 

You might assume that choosing AWS Kubernetes services like EKS is an easy way to sidestep the challenges of DIY Kubernetes — but actually there are several areas where you might still need help.

Where are the gaps?

While managed Kubernetes services, such as EKS, provide a great platform to build on, they’re not an all-in-one solution for enterprise Kubernetes. You need a way to handle a few other important areas, such as:

• The full stack. Inside each cluster, you’ll want to implement a standardized set of tools for security, monitoring, logging, and system applications, beyond what AWS provides.
• Upgrades and day-2 operations. Companies transitioning from ECS to Kubernetes often find the frequent upgrades of Kubernetes to be a significant hurdle. EKS handles control plane node upgrades, but worker nodes are your responsibility.
• Backup. AWS lacks a native enterprise backup solution for EKS, instead recommending third-party tools. 

Recent data from our State of Production Kubernetes survey shows that organizations are managing more clusters than ever before in cloud environments, and the more clusters you have to manage, the greater the challenges you’ll feel across all these areas.

Feeling the pain? You’re not alone

We’ve been at AWS Summits all summer long and it’s amazing how many people have spoken to us looking for guidance on their Kubernetes journey with AWS, and particularly EKS. 

I spoke with one IT leader who said he’d been trying to hire K8s operational staff to support his business’s growing AWS environment for almost a year. He was having difficulty finding the right people (and wished he’d seen Palette earlier because we could have saved him months of searching and interviews!).

If you’re embarking on this journey, you’re not alone — companies like Remine and Snackpass have faced similar hurdles in adopting EKS, and have found that expert assistance from a partner is often the key to unlocking the full potential of these technologies.

Finding the right AWS partner

So if you’re heading out to find a partner to support you with containers and Kubernetes on AWS, you’re spoiled for choice – there are thousands of companies in the Amazon Partner Network (APN). How do you pick the right one? 

You know you need a partner that’s reliable, and can offer not only technical expertise but also a deep understanding of your unique needs.

One place to start is to look for a partner with the right AWS competencies. 

Why AWS competencies matter

AWS competencies are a mark of excellence and specialization within the AWS ecosystem. They’re awarded to validate a partner’s proven expertise and track record with customers in specific use cases, workloads, or industries, ensuring that they can help you fully leverage AWS products and services.

To earn these competencies, partners must undergo rigorous validation, including:

• Assessments of the security, performance, and reliability of their AWS offerings and practices.
• Validation of real-world customer use cases, live in production.
• Technical validation through demonstration, documentation, and hands-on use of the product by an AWS Solutions Architect.

Speaking from first-hand experience, I can tell you that it’s a thorough process, and the result is a badge that you can truly trust.

At Spectro Cloud, we are proud to hold two AWS competencies:

• AWS Container Competency for Enterprise Container Management: This demonstrates our ability to manage and optimize containerized environments on AWS, a critical area for businesses utilizing Kubernetes.
• AWS Government Software Competency: This validates our expertise in delivering secure and compliant solutions to government agencies, highlighting our capability to handle sensitive and regulated workloads.

We’ve also earned a host of other AWS partner designations — ISV Accelerate, Well-Architected Partner Program and Public Sector Partner — which you can learn more about on our AWS solutions page. 

Suffice it to say that we’re proud of these badges and what they mean. They not only reflect our technical prowess, but also our commitment to best practices and customer satisfaction. 

Your cloud provider and partner — better together

The unspoken advantage of choosing a partner with competencies is that it’s clear they’re committed to staying close to the constantly evolving world of the AWS ecosystem, and working side by side with AWS’s own experts to build and co-deliver solutions. 

A good example is joint events. If you’re in London this October, you can see this collaboration play out at our Amazon EKS Advanced Workshop, where we’ll be going deep into how Palette and EKS are better together.

And of course AWS partners have expertise that you can call on during projects: architects like me, plus our award-winning customer success engineers and roster of system integrator partners. Because we’re Kubernetes veterans and know AWS inside-out, we can quickly answer questions that you might otherwise have wrestled with for days.

But at the end of the day, we’re a software company, and it’s our software platform, Palette, that’s performing the real magic with EKS for you. So let’s take a quick tour of what it does.

Enterprise Kubernetes Management on AWS with Palette

At Spectro Cloud, we specialize in helping businesses and organizations manage their cloud-native applications and microservices on AWS with ease and confidence. 

Our platform, Palette, provides a centralized management capability for Kubernetes clusters, enabling teams to enforce consistent policies and configurations across their entire Kubernetes estate.

Our platform integrates seamlessly with AWS services such as Amazon EC2, EKS and Amazon Fargate, providing a unified view of cluster deployments across multiple environments. 

With Spectro Cloud, your teams can:

1. Deploy the full stack with consistency: You can define and enforce consistent policies and configurations across all Kubernetes clusters by using Cluster Profiles, ensuring that applications and microservices are deployed and managed according to best practices.This includes not just Kubernetes itself, but the ‘full stack’ of monitoring, security tools, etc.

2. Streamline lifecycle management: Palette automates away toil. Tasks like upgrades, scaling and monitoring are included out of the box and can be performed at scale across all your clusters from a single pane of glass. We’ve also integrated backup tools into Palette.

3. Ensure security and compliance: We augment AWS with advanced security and compliance features, from granular RBAC to security scans. We also support AWS’s GovCloud services, both IaaS and managed Kubernetes.

4. Accelerate time-to-market: Our key value is that we help you accelerate your time-to-market for infrastructure and the applications that run on it. As an orchestration tool, Palette enables you to build once and deploy to thousands of clusters with ease by defining the entire application stack in a declarative manner.

To get an overview of how Palette fits with Amazon EKS, you can watch me and my fellow solution architect Justin chatting with Sai and Ray from AWS on Containers from the Couch.

How we can help

So there you have it. As you navigate the complex landscape of Kubernetes on AWS, having a knowledgeable partner can make all the difference. 

With the right expertise, tools, and competencies at your side, you can overcome challenges, optimize your operations, and fully capitalize on the power of Kubernetes.

To learn more about how our competencies can benefit your organization, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Visit our APN listing to learn more about our accreditations and use cases.
• Contact us for a demo and self-service access to the platform — we also have a special Quickstart offer available for a limited time. 
• Meet with us at AWS re:Invent. We’ll be on site in Vegas with live demos… put us to the test!
• Explore our AWS solutions further.