Amazon is the next company to jump on the Kubernetes bandwagon, as it announces the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) at the AWS Re:Invent conference.

The announcement is significant for the Google-created container orchestration software. Following its becoming an open source project headed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it was adopted by just about every big name in the cloud, including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba and, of course, Google itself.

While it might be a late adopter, Amazon states it is more than ready for the service, since it claims it is already one of the largest hosts of Kubernetes clusters, running millions of containers. However, running Kubernetes on top of AWS previously involved no direct support from Amazon. EKS adds such support, with AWS managing the system for users.

Microsoft a rebranding of the Azure Container Service (ACS)-- the acronym behind the service is now "AKS," with the K standing for Kubernetes, the Google open-source container orchestration service.

Technically AKS still stands for Azure Container Service, mind, but Microsoft is now putting its weight behind what is becoming the container standard. It offers an Azure-hosted control plane and is free to use on, even if customers have to pay for the VM running the container (alternatives, such as Google Container Engine, demand a flat fee per hour and cluster).

According to Microsoft, Kubernetes has the advantage of "unique" community involvement and portability, leading it to hire Kubernetes co-creator Brendan Burns as leader of Azure container efforts, as well as the acquisition of Deis, developer of the Helm package manager and Steward Kubernetes-native service broker.

Google and Cisco are the next two companies to announce a cloud partnership-- specifically one in a "unique and open" hybrid cloud deployed, managed and secured across on-premises Cisco-based environments and Google Cloud Platform.

According to Cisco, the result is a "cloud speed and scale, with enterprise-class security." Enterprises will be able to run, secure and monitor workloads, plan cloud migration at own pace, and avoid vendor lock in. It also allows one to develop new applications in the cloud or on premises using the same developer tools, run time and production environment.

As one might imagine, the development, deployment and management environment comes through either Cisco Hyperflex Private Cloud Infrastructure (in the case of on-premises) or Google Container Engine (in public cloud).

The Dell EMC Azure Stack hybrid cloud solution gets an upgrade through the addition of 14th generation PowerEdge server hardware, powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

First launched back in 2015, Azure Stack is a software and converged hardware bundle offered by select Microsoft partners. It provides infrastructure and platform as a service functionality, allowing organisations to run private Azure clouds from on-premises datacentres. It uses the same APIs as the public Azure cloud, making it ideal for customers familiar with Microsoft technology.