Container products in AWS Marketplace

Container products are standalone products fulfilled as container images. Container products can either be free or must be paid for using a seller-provided pricing option. Container products can be used with multiple container runtimes and services, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and even services running on your own infrastructure. For a complete list of supported runtimes and services with more information about each, see Supported services for container products.

You can discover, subscribe to, and deploy container products on the AWS Marketplace website or in the Amazon ECS console. You can deploy many products to Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS by using seller-supplied deployment templates, such as task definitions or Helm charts. Or, you can access container images directly from private Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repositories after you have subscribed to those products.

If a product has enabled QuickLaunch, you can use it to quickly test container products on an Amazon EKS cluster with just a few steps. QuickLaunch uses AWS CloudFormation to create an Amazon EKS cluster and launch container software on it. For more information about launching with QuickLaunch, see QuickLaunch in AWS Marketplace.

This section provides information about finding, subscribing to, and launching container products in AWS Marketplace.

Pricing models for paid container products

Paid container products must have one or more pricing models. Like with any other paid products in AWS Marketplace, you're billed for paid container products by AWS according to the pricing model. The pricing model might be a fixed monthly fee or an hourly price, monitored in seconds and prorated. Pricing details will be shown on the detail page and when you subscribe to the product.

The supported pricing models for container products in AWS Marketplace are as follows:

• A fixed monthly charge that provides unlimited usage.

• An upfront charge for usage of the product for the duration of a long term contract.

• A pay-as-you-go model (typically hourly) based on usage of the product.

• A pay-up-front model with contract pricing.

For more information about each model, see Container product pricing in the AWS Marketplace Seller Guide.

Supported services for container products

The following list includes all of the supported services for container products in AWS Marketplace. A supported service is a container service or environment where the product can be launched. A container product must include at least one fulfillment option that includes a delivery method with instructions to launch to one or more of the environments.

Amazon ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast container management service that you can use to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. Your containers are defined in a task definition that you use to run individual tasks or tasks within a service. In this context, a service is a configuration that allows you to run and maintain a specified number of tasks simultaneously in a cluster. You can run your tasks and services on a serverless infrastructure that's managed by AWS Fargate. Alternatively, for more control over your infrastructure, you can run your tasks and services on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances that you manage.

For more information about Amazon ECS, see What is Amazon Elastic Container Service in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

You can search for, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes software using the Amazon EKS console. For more information, see Managing Amazon EKS add-ons in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Self-managed Kubernetes

You can launch container products on self-managed Kubernetes clusters running in EKS Anywhere, Amazon ECS Anywhere, Amazon EC2, or on-premises infrastructure.

Amazon ECS Anywhere is a feature of Amazon ECS that you can use to run and manage container workloads on customer managed infrastructure. Amazon ECS Anywhere builds upon Amazon ECS to provide a consistent tooling and API experience across your container-based applications.

For more information, see Amazon ECS Anywhere.

EKS Anywhere is a service that you can use to create an Amazon EKS cluster on customer managed infrastructure. You can deploy EKS Anywhere as an unsupported local environment or as a production-quality environment that can become a supported on-premises Kubernetes platform.

For more information about EKS Anywhere, see the EKS Anywhere documentation.

Overview of containers and Kubernetes

Containers, such as Docker containers, are an open-source software technology that provides an additional layer of abstraction and automation over virtualized operating systems such as Linux and Windows Server. Just as virtual machines are instances of server images, containers are instances of Docker container images. They wrap server application software in a file system that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and so on. With containers, the software always runs the same, regardless of its environment.

Analogous to Java virtual machines, containers require an underlying platform to provide a translation and orchestration layer while being isolated from the operating system and each other. There are different Docker-compatible runtimes and orchestration services that you can use with Docker containers, including Amazon ECS, which is a highly scalable, high-performance orchestration service for AWS, and Amazon EKS, which makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes, an open source management and orchestration service.