Amazon EKS Case Studies: How Are Businesses Benefiting from EKS?

Containerization is becoming increasingly popular for the scalability, agility, portability, faster deliveries, and modernization it provides. But for all the benefits it offers, containerization is not a silver bullet. It poses an operational challenge when managing large clusters. This is where container orchestration steps in.

Container orchestration automates all tasks related to cluster deployment, management, and scaling. And Kubernetes is one such popular platform, with 96% of organizations using it or evaluating it as a preferred container orchestration solution.

But what if you want to host Kubernetes containers in the AWS cloud? Amazon EKS is a fully managed cloud service to run Kubernetes clusters in AWS. This article talks about EKS in detail and case studies of how organizations worldwide are successfully leveraging EKS. Let’s begin!

What Is Amazon EKS?

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a fully managed container orchestration service from AWS that helps organizations run and scale Kubernetes apps in the AWS cloud or on-premise. 

It enables you to run Kubernetes workloads without having to install, run, or configure the Kubernetes control plane. Instead, AWS manages it to run administration tasks such as scaling clusters across multiple AWS Availability Zones, upgrades, patching, security configurations, and replacing unhealthy instances.

It is also a certified Kubernetes conformant, so your existing applications running on upstream Kubernetes are compatible with EKS. Here are some other key features of EKS:

• Automatically manages availability and scalability with Kubernetes control plane running across multiple AWS Availability Zones

• Comes with the performance, reliability, and availability of AWS infrastructure

• Integrates with other AWS services, including Application Load Balancers (ALBs), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and more

• Supports serverless compute with Fargate

• Can also deploy with EC2, EKS Anywhere for on-premise infrastructure, or with your own tools

• Allows you to create, update, scale, and terminate cluster nodes with a single command

• Fully compatible with Kubernetes community tools and other popular Kubernetes add-ons

Is EKS Better than ECS?

But how is EKS different from ECS, another container management solution offered by AWS? Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows you to easily deploy, manage, and scale Docker containers in AWS. It is an AWS-opinionated solution for running containers at scale, but organizations prefer ECS for the simplicity it provides. On the other hand, organizations prefer EKS for the flexibility and vibrant ecosystem of Kubernetes. 

While both services are excellent orchestration solutions and share multiple similarities, they differ in terms of pricing, ease of use, compatibility, and more. For a detailed comparison of the two, check out this blog post on Amazon ECS vs. EKS. 

How Are Organizations Worldwide Successfully Leveraging EKS?

Leading organizations, including Snap Inc., GoDaddy, Intel, Autodesk, and more, use EKS to run critical applications due to its enriching benefits, such as scalability, reliability, and security. So, let us look at real-life examples of how organizations benefited from using EKS.

1. Momenta

A Beijing-based technology company, Momenta, uses ML to create software for autonomous driving. Recently, it migrated its self-managed Kubernetes clusters to EKS for better scalability, availability, and cost-efficiency as its business expanded. Before moving to EKS, Momenta faced the following challenges:

• Diminishing returns on compute performance resulting from the need to increase Kubernetes workers nodes to support growth

• Frequent releases demanded Momenta to take its clusters offline and make updates, thereby interrupting operations

Along with scalability, availability, and security (of node deployment) issues, Momenta faced an increasing operational and maintenance burden.

Migrating to Amazon EKS helped solve numerous challenges and added multiple benefits as follows:

• Momenta migrated to EKS in only two months

• EKS proved as a compatible solution as Momenta already used a range of AWS services

• It didn’t have to maintain its own Kubernetes control plane

• It could take advantage of the flexibility of EKS worker nodes

• It achieved improved availability, business continuity, and significant cost savings on compute due to optimized workload performance.

Overall, migrating to Amazon EKS simplified Kubernetes operations and maintenance for Momenta.

2. Wynk Music

Wynk Music, a leading music streaming service in India, launched a Content Discovery platform to offer personalized experiences to its subscribers and grow its revenue. To support the new Discovery platform, Wynk migrated its monolithic applications to EKS for an agile and horizontally scalable architecture. It achieved the following benefits:

• Reduced development time taken for new customer services from two weeks to four days

• DevOps team could run, scale and test tasks independently and in parallel, resulting in faster services creation

• Greater agility

• Easy maintenance of Kubernetes clusters

• It could also automatically accommodate changing traffic volumes at 99 percentile latency or under 50 milliseconds with EKS Cluster Autoscaler

Overall, adopting EKS allowed teams at Wynk to focus on building essential customer-related services as each developer could exercise end-to-end ownership of each microservice. In addition, the company plans to migrate more workloads to EKS to continue growing its user base and improving user experience.

3. Chatwork

Chatwork, a popular business chat tool, was self-managing its Kubernetes on Amazon EC2. But it found the administrative and operational load of upgrading the Kubernetes version every 3 months to be cumbersome. So it migrated fully to Amazon EKS. As a result of adopting EKS:

• Chatwork could make configuration changes to its service infrastructure more easily and with greater flexibility

• It could take an SLA-based phased release strategy

• It reduced the time taken for rollback or failover after a release issue by 95%

• The operational work required to perform a release was reduced by 90%

• It achieved better optimization of system costs

• Its system grew operationally resilient and flexible to withstand traffic surges resulting from events like marketing campaigns

Overall, AKS enabled engineers at Chatwork to focus on improving its applications with declarative Kubernetes deployments and failover quickly when issues occur. As a result, it could respond to customer requests quickly.

Conclusion

While Amazon EKS provides excellent benefits, it is essential to consider your use cases and development team before adopting EKS. It is ideal in scenarios such as if your team has already worked with a Kubernetes-native application or if you are looking for a more sophisticated container orchestration solution. If you need better understanding and guidance, you can always turn to your tech experts!