What is AWS EKS Anywhere?
AWS service that offers customers to operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises using its open-source EKS distro.
Amazon EKS Anywhere lets you create and operate clusters using the on-premises infrastructure. It is now a generally available feature.
Here is some key information you should know about EKS anywhere
It uses the same distribution of Kubernetes that powers EKS on AWS. Distribution of the same open-source Kubernetes and dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS.
It supports VMware vSphere and bare metal server deployments.
Amazon EKS Anywhere provides Bottlerocket, a Linux-based open-source operating system built by AWS, as the default node operating system, with Ubuntu as a node OS alternative.
It is available as open-source software that you can freely download, install on your existing hardware, and run in your own data centers.
You can provision the cluster using the eksctl utility.
You can manage EKS anywhere cluster on the AWS EKS console by registering it using the EKS Anywhere provider and the EKS connector agent that runs on your on-premises cluster. This lets you visualize all workloads as a single pane of glass for clusters.
EKS Anywhere will not manage the underlying cluster infrastructure or your cluster control plane. It is a shared responsibility. AWS provides only tooling.
There is no charge for using AWS anywhere. However, charges apply if you opt for enterprise support for anywhere clusters. Ie, $24,000 per cluster per year.
Note: EKS console also supports connecting GKE, AKS, Openshift, self-hosted ec2 k8s cluster, etc to the EKS console to visualize workloads using relevant provider plugins.
Further Learning Resources
[1]. EKS connector
[2]. EKS FAQs
[3]. Getting Started With EKS anywhere