Kubernetes on Docker for Windows -> AKS/EKS

Question

With the Kubernetes orchestrator now available in the stable version of Docker Desktop for Win/Mac, I've been playing around with running an existing compose stack on Kubernetes locally.

This works fine, e.g., docker stack deploy -c .\docker-compose.yml myapp.

Now I want to go to the next step of running this same application in a production environment using the likes of Amazon EKS or Azure AKS. These services expect proper Kubernetes YAML files.

My question(s) is what's the best way to get these files, or more specifically:

1. Presumably, docker stack is performing some conversion from Compose YAML to Kubernetes YAML 'under the hood'. Is there documentation/source code links as to what is going on here and can that converted YAML be exported?
2. Or should I just be using Kompose?
3. It seems that running the above docker stack deploy command against a remote context (e.g., AKS/EKS) is not possible and that one must do a kubectl deploy. Can anyone confirm?

Answer 1

docker stack deploy with a Compose file to Kube only works on Docker's Kubernetes distributions - Docker Desktop and Docker Enterprise.

With the recent federation announcement you'll be able to manage AKS and EKS with Docker Enterprise, but using them direct means you'll have to use Kubernetes manifest files and kubectl.