State of Managed Kubernetes 2021
EKS vs. AKS vs. GKE from a Developer’s Perspective (2021 Edition)
Kubernetes turns seven on June 7th, with the stable release now at v1.21. As Kubernetes began to rule the container orchestration world, use of containers in production also quickly became the norm, with more than 23% of CNCF survey respondents running more than 5,000 containers in their organization, up 109% from 2016. However, managing Kubernetes remains a difficult task, which is growing the demand for managed Kubernetes offerings from the major cloud vendors.
Last year, I published my second managed Kubernetes service comparison piece, detailing the differences between Amazon’s EKS, Microsoft’s AKS, and Google’s GKE from a developer’s point of view. A lot has changed since then both in terms of the offerings by the vendors and my personal experience using these services. So here’s the 2021 edition of the state of managed Kubernetes.
“The challenge of scaling Kubernetes, the complexity of managing the control plane, the API layer, the database — that isn’t for the faint of heart.”
— Deepak Singh, VP of Compute Services at AWS
