Streamlining Kubernetes Operations for Amazon EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) for Bare Metal Environments

Amazon EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) now supports a deployment option to provision Kubernetes clusters on bare metal environments such as data centers. EKS Anywhere provides an installable software package for creating and managing Kubernetes clusters in data centers, along with tooling for cluster lifecycle support.

EKS Anywhere is ideal for AWS customers looking for a consistent experience for their containerized applications in the cloud and on premises. Instead of enterprises needing to build and manage their own DIY tooling to deploy Kubernetes on premises, EKS Anywhere delivers automation tooling that enterprises can leverage to deploy the same Kubernetes distribution (EKS-D) that underpins Amazon EKS clusters in public cloud regions.

A fast-growing number of AWS customers leverage Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) to meet enterprise-grade automation, security, visibility and governance requirements imposed by platform teams on EKS deployments in public cloud regions. Customers planning to leverage EKS Anywhere for on-premises, bare metal environments can now operate both public cloud and on-premises based clusters easily with Rafay.

The Rafay platform delivers a broad set of operational services designed to help enterprise platform teams effectively and efficiently manage the lifecycle of Amazon EKS clusters (both on premises and in public cloud regions) as well as the modern applications being deployed by application teams on said clusters.

The Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform provides organizations with six core services to streamline both EKS and EKS Anywhere operations:

Multi-Cluster Management Service

Ops and platform teams can use this to automate the lifecycle and ongoing operations of Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere clusters. Organizations can standardize their Kubernetes clusters using cluster blueprints across both public cloud and data center environments ensuring that required versions of critical software add-ons are consistently deployed on the entire fleet of clusters.

Zero-Trust Access Service

Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access Service allows organizations to enforce controlled, audited SSO-based access for developers, SREs and automation systems to Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere clusters across both public cloud and on-premises environments.

The service enables platform teams to define and enforce isolation boundaries across Kubernetes infrastructure to align with internal teams for enterprise-level multi-tenancy. Users can access any cluster, anywhere, without needing VPNs or jumphosts, or without exposing Kubernetes API endpoints to the public Internet. Organizations can implement just-in-time federation of RBAC to 100s of Kubernetes clusters with ephemeral service accounts for user access to remote clusters under management.

Backup & Restore Service

Rafay’s integrated Backup & Restore Service enables organizations to implement backups of both the cluster control plane and volumes for both Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere clusters. Enterprise platform teams expect production clusters to be automatically backed up periodically, ensuring that clusters and resident applications can be recovered in case of disaster.

Visibility & Monitoring Service

Rafay’s Visibility & Monitoring Service enables development, operations and security/governance teams to visualize and monitor modern apps and underlying Kubernetes infrastructure through dedicated dashboards. The service delivers organization-wide dashboards, team-level dashboards, cluster health dashboards, cluster resource dashboards, and application-level dashboards, ensuring all stakeholders can easily debug and resolve issues across public cloud and on-premises environments via a single pane of glass.

Policy Management Service

Rafay’s Kubernetes Policy Management Service enables organizations to consistently deploy and enforce OPA Gatekeeper based policies across the entire fleet of Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere clusters.

GitOps Service

Rafay’s GitOps Service enables application teams to use Git as the source of truth for both their applications as well as Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere cluster configuration. While EKS Anywhere comes pre-packaged with FluxCD for GitOps-driven configuration management, customers can leverage the Rafay GitOps Service to manage additional add-ons and components that are not part of the EKS-A core configuration.

Leverage the integrated GitOps Service to trigger multi-cluster deployment of containerized applications across EKS and EKS Anywhere clusters. With Rafay, enterprises DO NOT need to expose their Git servers over the Internet, and can deploy applications across public cloud and on-premise clusters via easy-to-use, multi-stage pipelines.

Ready to find out why so many organizations have partnered with Rafay and AWS to streamline Amazon EKS and EKS Anywhere operations?

Watch a video of Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform managing an EKS Anywhere Bare Metal cluster in a data center.

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