The battle of Managed Kubernetes services: GKE vs EKS vs AKS
Organizations all around the world are switching to deploying apps and are rapidly scaling them up as they go forth. This has created an urgency for container adoption as the industry standard. The wide adoption of containers accompanies the orchestration of these containers.
Container orchestration is the need of the hour at this point in time. Google took the market by storm by launching Kubernetes and the competitors are just playing the catching game till this date. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have their own container orchestration services too but they decided to offer services implementing Kubernetes because of its wide acceptance and standardization.
Given the fierce competition in the cloud market, Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure have similar Kubernetes container orchestration services and this can be a difficult choice for the customer. In this article, we tend to create a distinction between these three services i.e., Google Kubernetes Engine, Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Let’s have a look at the comparison between these services:
GKE vs EKS vs AKS
Where can you use these services?
GKP, EKS, and AKS are available in nearly every region that Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure operate in. In GKE, in a cluster, there is at least one cluster master and a number of worker machines that are called nodes. In EKS, you can run multiple applications taking in use Kubernetes namespaces and IAM security policies on a single cluster. You can use AKS also on Azure Government. GKP has an SLA of 99.5% in zone and 99.95 in the region, EKS has 99.9% SLA and AKS has 99.5% SLA.
What features do these services offer?
When it comes to Control Plane upgrades, GKE gives you automation and On-Demand while EKS and AKS give only On-Demand upgrades. Worker upgrades are only provided by GKE and AKS but not EKS. However, only EKS gives the option of bare metal nodes. All three of GKE, EKS, and AKS give the users the option to use GPU nodes, Linux containers, and Windows containers. One major where EKS lacks is resource monitoring which GKE and AKS provide. They all have load balancers and the option of global load balancing.
However, in EKS you have to manually handle global load balancing and the other two have automation options for that. The number of nodes per cluster is where GKE shines and gives you 5000 nodes per cluster, EKS falls really short of the competition and only provides you with 100 nodes per cluster and AKS is much better at 500 nodes per cluster but is way less than that of GKE.
How much will each service cost me?
Whether you use either of these services, you have to pay for each in-built service that you use on each cloud platform. These include virtual machines, storage, and every other resource. But when it comes to EKS, you have to pay an additional $0.10 per hour for each EKS cluster you create. There is no cost associated with the use of GKE and AKS.
What should I choose?
There is no clear winner when it comes to the Kubernetes adopted container orchestration service. If you’re an extensive user of Microsoft enterprise services, you may find AKS a good option and on the other hand, if you’re tied in the Google ecosystem, GKE can be your good friend. AWS being the market leader at this point can also tempt you for the host of services that they offer. In the end, it comes down to the infrastructure and needs of the organization.
Need more advice?
At Opslyft, we have a team of experts that have a great experience in the cloud, so we can understand your confusion. Making a decision about deploying such an important service for your applications is a tough one but with a little guidance you can choose the best option for you. We can help you but understanding your whole infrastructure and then your business needs. We take pride in our AIOps framework that helps optimize the infrastructure of organizations and ultimately help them cut cloud costs.
