Cloud Service Provider 2nd Watch Eyes Expanded Role In AWS Kubernetes Realm

AWS Consulting Premier Partner 2nd Watch says the new EKS Blueprints from AWS provides a framework for more quickly configuring and deploying Kubernetes clusters for clients.

Global cloud services provider 2nd Watch is supporting Amazon Web Services’ recently launched EKS Blueprints framework for Kubernetes deployments in a move that 2nd Watch, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, says will allow it to more quickly configure and deploy Kubernetes clusters for clients.

2nd Watch is just one of a small handful of AWS partners chosen by the giant cloud platform company to help businesses and organizations adopt and customize EKS Blueprints to meet their specific requirements.

Embracing EKS Blueprints will help 2nd Watch meet the growing demand for Kubernetes-related services as clients turn to Kubernetes in general – and Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) in particular – as part of their expanding multi-cloud environments.

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“This is going to allow us to deploy Kubernetes in a homogenous way across our entire client base,” said Jesse Samm, who leads the application modernization and DevOps practice at 2nd Watch, in a briefing with CRN. “It’s a Kubernetes accelerator.”

“The idea is to make it very fast and easy to spin up one or more Kubernetes clusters on EKS in a repeatable fashion,” said James Connell, a senior solutions architect with 2nd Watch, in the briefing.

Amazon EKS is the cloud platform giant’s fully managed service for building, securing, operating and maintaining Kubernetes clusters on AWS. Just last month AWS launched EKS Blueprints, an open-source collection of infrastructure-as-code modules that provide a cohesive, integrated framework for configuring and deploying consistent EKS clusters across AWS accounts and regions.

This week Seattle-based 2nd Watch, which provides professional and managed cloud services to enterprise clients, said it is among a handful of Premier Consulting Partners that AWS has tapped to work with EKS Blueprints. 2nd Watch went through a rigorous validation process with AWS to ensure that it has the technical expertise and resources to perform the EKS Blueprints work.

“They bring us in to help clients develop their Kubernetes roadmaps and accelerate their Kubernetes transformations,” Samm said.

Kubernetes implementations are being driven by the overall adoption of multi-cloud IT architectures, Samm said. That, in turn, is driving cloud workload and service containerization.

“Being cloud-agnostic is very attractive for a lot of organizations and right now there is basically one way to do it,” Samm said, pointing to Kubernetes, which has become the default standard for deploying and orchestrating container clusters. Kubernetes containers also improve the experience for developers building cloud applications, he added.

EKS Blueprints “give platform operators complete control and consistency in defining standards, policies, rules for security, software delivery, monitoring, and networking for all deployed applications,” 2nd Watch said in a statement announcing its support for the framework.

EKS Blueprints “enable productivity, decrease administrative tasks, and allow developers to focus on continuous integration. EKS Blueprints provides a repeatable process for deploying and managing several AWS services that will benefit the organization‘s platform operators and development teams,” according to 2nd Watch.