At its AWS event today, Amazon is making announcement after announcement and a surprising number of them have to do with services that are essentially free or Open Source. Along the same, the company has announced open source Blox container management tools to allow developers to create custom schedulers for use inside its Container Service.
The open source Blox technology is available now on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. The repository includes both the reference scheduler and a service the can be used for capturing and querying data on clusters. Developers will now be able to use and deploy these tools inside the AWS’ EC2 container. You can also deploy the framework on your local Docker installation, which actually is how AWS believes you should start.
In case you are unaware of it:
Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
And the company is giving developers even more control over what they can do within the containers. This will also allow Amazon to ensure that its customers stay within its ecosystem. Up until now, they were forced to got to Google-companies like Kubernetes, Mesosphere’s Mesos and so on for scheduling within containers. Thanks to the Blox open sourcing today though, the company has brought the service to developers, encouraging them to use it further.
Some of the other potential use case scenarios for AWS’s open source Blox are as follows:
- A new ECS cluster with one container instance on which the Blox components are setup as an ECS service with cluster-state-service, daemon-scheduler and etcd containers making up a single task.
- An Application Load Balancer is created in front of the daemon-scheduler endpoint.
- An API Gateway is set up as the public facing frontend to Blox and provides the authentication mechanism. This API Gateway can be used to reach the scheduler and manage tasks on the ECS cluster.
- A Lambda function that acts as a simple proxy enables the public facing API Gateway endpoint to forward requests onto the ALB listener in the VPC
