Executives at Amazon Web Services used to pride themselves on ignoring products offered by rivals like Microsoft and Google. Not anymore.

AWS is considering developing a new cloud service based on a Google-created software tool called Kubernetes, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Used to run many applications at the same time, Kubernetes is increasingly popular with developers. It helps companies increase the number of applications and servers they manage without hiring a lot of extra staff. It also has become popular with artificial intelligence researchers who use the software to manage experiments spanning large numbers of machines.