Today, I am excited to announce the Preview of the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable, high performance container management service. We created EC2 Container Service to help customers run and manage Dockerized distributed applications.

Benefits of Containers
Customers have been using Linux containers for quite some time on AWS and have increasingly adopted microservice architectures. The microservices approach to developing a single application is to divide the application into a set of small services, each running its own processes, which communicate with each other. Each small service can be scaled independently of the application and can be managed by different teams. This approach can increase agility and speed of feature releases. The compact, resource efficient footprint of containers was attractive to sysadmins looking to pack lots of different applications and tasks, such as a microservice, onto an instance. Over the past 20 months, the development of Docker has opened up the power of containers to the masses by giving developers a simple way to package applications into containers that are portable from environment to environment. We saw a lot of customers start adopting containers in their production environments because Docker containers provided a consistent and resource efficient platform to run distributed applications. They experienced reduced operational complexity and increased developer velocity and pace of releases.

Cluster Management Difficulties
Getting started with Docker containers is relatively easy, but deploying and managing containers, in the thousands, at scale is difficult without proper cluster management. Maintaining your own cluster management platform involves installing and managing your own configuration management, service discovery, scheduling, and monitoring systems. Designing the right architecture to scale these systems is no trivial task. We saw customers struggle with this over and over.

Leveraging AWS
When we started AWS, the thinking was we could use Amazon’s expertise in ultra-scalable system software and offer a set of services that could act as infrastructure building blocks to customers. Through AWS, we believed that developers would no longer need to focus on buying, building, and maintaining infrastructure but rather focus on creating new things. Today with EC2 Container Service, we believe developers no longer need to worry about managing containers and clusters. Rather, we think they can go back to creating great applications, containerize them, and leave the rest to AWS. EC2 Container Service helps you capitalize on Docker’s array of benefits by taking care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of container and cluster management: we are providing you containers as a service. Furthermore, through EC2 Container Service, we are treating Docker containers as core building blocks of computing infrastructure and providing them many of the same capabilities that you are used to with EC2 instances (e.g., VPCs, security groups, etc) at the container level.

Sign up here for the Preview and tell us what you think. We are just getting started and have a lot planned on our roadmap. We are interested in listening to what features you all would like to use. Head over to Jeff Barr’s blog to learn more about how to use EC2 Container Service.