Amazon Web Services (AWS) fleshed out its container support plans by expanding the reach of a pair of its current bread-and-butter offerings and throwing out its new Proton platform as a new way for organizations to construct microservices. The moves also play on the cloud giant’s dominant position in the broader ecosystem.

AWS’ Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) will be able to both be run “anywhere,” which means in an on-premises environment. This allows customers to run either platform across their current AWS cloud or on-premises environment and manage those deployments from a single console. The feature is set to roll out during the first half of next year.

AWS’ ECS is its fully-managed and opinionated container hosting platform that is tightly integrated into the AWS ecosystem. EKS is AWS’ Kubernetes-focused container platform that allows for more flexibility by tapping into the broader Kubernetes ecosystem. AWS also offers its Fargate runtime layer for EC2 that allows customers to run containers without managing servers and clusters.

During his lengthy keynote address at this week’s re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained that ECS Anywhere will have “all the same AWS-style API's and cluster configuration management pieces on premises that you have in the cloud, so it makes it easy.” That same type of migration and integration is also available for EKS Anywhere.

While the actual “anywhere” platform launches are still several months away, Jassy did note that AWS is immediately offering an open source version of the EKS distribution so users can begin to prepare for the anywhere launch. “It’ll be exactly the same as what we do with EKS, we will make all the same patches and updates, so you can actually be starting to transition as you get ready for EKS Anywhere,” he explained.

That expansion should further AWS’ container positioning. Jassy noted that around two-thirds of all containers running in the cloud are running on AWS, which he attributed to its trio of offerings, adding that ECS counts more than 100,000 active users.

Tangentially to the container platform updates, AWS also is now allowing developers to use their container imagers to construct Lambda-based serverless applications. Jassy said that this allows those developers to package code dependencies with any Docker container image, any Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible container image, or any third-party base container image to deploy a Lambda function.

Analysts noted that the move is similar to what Google is doing with its Cloud Run serverless compute platform for containerized applications.

This also ties into AWS’ release earlier this week of its Elastic Container Registry Public (ECR Public) that allows developers to share and deploy container images publicly to construct their applications. That platform also provides an avenue to bypass a recently instituted fee structure put in place by Docker Inc. for its widely used Docker Hub platform.

AWS also unveiled a public preview of its Proton service that is designed to automate the process of managing infrastructure provisioning and code deployment for serverless and container-based applications.

Proton is designed to provide a curated template of AWS best practices for constructing and running microservices in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Once a template is defined, Proton handles the provisioning of cloud resources, deploys the code, monitors the performance of the application, and provides visibility into the status of that application.

It can integrate with commonly used CI/CD platforms and observability tools to provide management and observability of those microservices running on systems like AWS Fargate or Lambda. Proton can also collect insight about those deployments and alert an IT team to when a template changes and which existing applications are now running the old template.

Jassy repeatedly dubbed this “a game changer.”

Deepak Singh, VP of compute services at AWS, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that Proton is about making a smaller team able to act as a much larger team within an organization. He said it does this by making it easier for that small team to manage what are becoming a growing number of components that make up a microservices-based deployment model.

“These are things that customers want to do,” Singh noted. “This simplifies it for them and gets them onto that train a lot faster.”

However, developers quickly questioned the curated approach as being somewhat divergent from a typical microservices architecture. This is due to Proton’s construct of having different teams managing the infrastructure and services components of the broader stack.

“This guarded platform approach is an anti-pattern for modern architecture development,” wrote Stackery CTO Chase Douglas in a blog post on the AWS news. “It splits architecture development between teams. Having the central platform team own all infrastructure development also creates a bottleneck for the development teams.”

AWS has been proactive in explaining Proton, perhaps knowing that it would garner some early questions. Singh did note that Proton development remains ongoing, adding that it currently supports ECS, EKS, and Lambda, and that EC2 support was still up in the air.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to correct Deepak Singh's title at AWS.