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We’re living in a hybrid world
Our vision at Spectro Cloud has always been to help enterprises run Kubernetes their way — in whatever environment they choose, configured the way they choose — with simple and unified management from day 0 through day 2.
Many organizations have chosen cloud, and in particular managed cloud K8s services like Amazon EKS. AWS offers the convenience and scalability of cloud resources, a whole rich ecosystem of developer and operations tooling, and customer reassurance that the hyperscaler will manage the Kubernetes control plane for them.
That said, many of these same enterprises also operate on-prem infrastructure, in data centers and near-edge environments like factories, labs, branch offices and retail stores. These on-prem use cases aren’t going away; in fact, they’re becoming more relevant and important. For example, many companies are using on-prem GPU capacity for AI/ML workloads, and are keen to eliminate control plane overhead to maximize utilization.
What if you could get the best of both cloud and on-prem worlds?
For a long time, IT leaders have been looking for an effective way to unify those on-prem and cloud resources, creating a unified hybrid architecture.
Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes: a step into the future
With today’s announcement of Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes at AWS re:Invent, AWS has made an exciting step forward into making that hybrid world real for enterprises.
Hybrid Nodes enable enterprises to join their bare metal or virtual machine (VM) hosts in near-edge and data center locations to serve as worker nodes as part of an EKS cluster, with the EKS control plane managed by AWS in the cloud. The result is a cluster that stretches across cloud and on-prem locations.
My colleague Tyler goes deeper into the technical use cases for hybrid architectures in his blog, so here we’ll just say this: it’s exactly what many organizations have been waiting for.
If you’re a pharma manufacturer, hybrid lets you deploy your manufacturing execution system (MES) right in the plant where it needs to be, and high-performance computing workloads in the lab or data center, while the control plane for both stays in the cloud.
As a retailer, you can run AI/ML workloads like facial recognition on specialized hardware in stores and warehouses, without needing Kubernetes experts on site.
And if you’re a real-money gaming company, you can process bets and keep customer data within state lines to stay compliant with regulation, while benefiting from the easy management and rapid scalability of the cloud.
Where Palette comes in
If you watched the re:Invent keynote where Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes was announced, you’ll have spotted that Spectro Cloud is a launch partner for the feature.
It’s a natural extension of the work we’re already doing to help Amazon EKS customers maximize the value they’re getting from the cloud.
Our Palette management platform provides a single pane of glass for customers to:
- Consistently provision the full cluster software stack to their Amazon EKS clusters with flexibility in integrating modern applications
- Manage, govern, and scale multiple EKS clusters in a consistent, unified manner
- Easily upgrade clusters and perform day 2 operations
It’s a true ‘better together’ story and customers have benefited from faster migrations to EKS and scaling of their EKS environments, plus reductions in operational cost and manual administrative tasks.
Today we’re pleased to bring this same value to EKS Hybrid Nodes, helping enterprises get going faster with this new architecture.
Palette helps out in two main areas.
First, Palette provides a mechanism to bootstrap the on-prem hosts in your data center and edge environments, ready to onboard into their EKS clusters. Doing this manually, at scale, can be hugely time-intensive — Palette automates many of the steps involved.
Second, Palette helps take care of all the extra configuration needed to create hybrid node worker pools, and provides end-to-end lifecycle management of the hybrid node pools that join into the EKS hybrid cluster — just as we do for all the Kubernetes clusters you run.
If you’d like to learn more about how it works and the value Palette adds to Hybrid Nodes, do take some time to read our deep-dive blog, and watch the demo video.
What are you waiting for?
If you’re as excited about Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes as we are, you’re probably wondering how you can take it for a spin in your own organization.
The best place to start is to sign up for a Spectro Cloud Palette Quickstart, a structured engagement to see the value of Palette and AWS together, whether you’re looking at EKS in general or the Hybrid Nodes feature specifically.
If you’re at re:Invent, you can find us on site for the rest of the week — head down to booth 1396 all week to talk to our AWS experts face to face.
