Containers

Docker

You are probably familiar with Docker. You have probably used it for running a database locally, or perhaps as part of your application's CI build.

Docker provides a simple interface to a long-existing Linux feature of containers. It introduced a leap forward in the usability of the feature, and thus Docker is often used a catch-all word for containers. However, it is slowly being replaced by standards such as OCI, containerd, and others.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator, allowing you to define your application's container specification, and then run it on many worker nodes across your Kubernetes cluster.

Most public cloud providers provide a managed Kubernetes services, so that your teams can focus on deploying software without managing the underlying cluster API, etcd database, etc. Examples of this are Amazon's EKS, Google's GKE, and Azure's AKS.

We go into greater detail about Kubernetes on the Declarative Infrastructure page.

Amazon ECS / Fargate

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is another container orchestrator, unique to Amazon. It is a good alternative to Kubernetes for small organizations.

Fargate is a feature of ECS that allows you to run containers without managing the underlying EC2 worker instances -- taking one more maintenance requirement off your plate.

AWS Lambda and other functions platforms

AWS Lambda is a functions-as-a-service platform. Rather than running your application all the time, in the chance that there is work to do (an HTTP request to respond to, or a queue item to process), your application is executed only in response to events. Lambdas can be triggered by HTTP requests, objects being created in a storage bucket, data being placed in a queue, cron schedule, and more. You pay only for the time that the application is running, and Lambda takes care of spinning up your application, keeping it warm for a bit, and tearing it down.

It is often called a "Serverless" product, in that you don't have servers to maintain. That is fine, but of course there are servers underlying the whole system so we think it's kind of a silly word. Additionally, there is a framework called Serverless that provides a simplified interface for writing and deploying applications based on Lamdba or other functions platforms.

Similar products on other clouds include Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions.

We group this in under the "Containers" page, as it provides a similar purpose -- an artifact packaging and compute execution platform.