Why are containers so cool?

What's also really exciting is that not only has the open source community embraced containers and Kubernetes, but the cloud providers have also deeply embraced the container ecosystem, and invested millions of dollars in supporting tooling, ecosystem, and management planes that can help manage containers. This means you have more options to run container workloads, and you'll have more tools to manage the scheduling and orchestration of the applications running on your clusters.

We'll explore some specific opportunities available to Kubernetes users, but at the time of this book's publishing, all of the major cloud service providers (CSPs) are offering some form of hosted or managed Kubernetes:

• Amazon Web Services: AWS offers Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) (for more information visit https://aws.amazon.com/eks/), a managed service that simplifies running Kubernetes clusters in their cloud. You can also roll your own clusters with kops (for information visit https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/custom-cloud/kops/). This product is still in active development:

• Google Cloud Platform: GCP offers the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) (for more information visit https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/), a powerful cluster manager that can deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications in the cloud. Google has been running containerized workloads for over 15 years, and this platform is an excellent choice for sophisticated workload management:

• Microsoft Azure: Azure offers the Azure Container Service (AKS) (for more information visit https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/), which aims to simplify the deployment, management, and operations of a full-scale Kubernetes cluster. This product is still in active development:

When you take advantage of one of these systems, you get built-in management of your Kubernetes cluster, which allows you to focus on the optimization, configuration, and deployment of your cluster.