Amazon EKS Reviews

For the usual use cases of Amazon EKS, we have been running different kinds of servers, such as web pages, and we have also used it to provide the SaaS solution for the end customer, delivering software as a service to the end customers. Basically, I deal with apps, SaaS applications, and websites.

We don't use Amazon EKS internally for us; we usually provide the service to others for their solutions.

The most valuable capability of Amazon EKS is managing the management portion of Kubernetes, which is the best thing that we get from Amazon EKS. Even though we have to upgrade it every six to seven months, it provides all the things required for us, so if a person knows how to install it and make use of it, that's all that's needed for using Amazon EKS.

Regarding self-healing nodes of EKS in minimizing administrative burdens for my customers, I appreciate that this feature allows nodes to try to heal themselves, which is a good feature. However, I haven't used this feature often, but having the service's ability to find and heal themselves or replicate is a good option for Amazon EKS to maintain high infrastructure uptime.

The area of Amazon EKS that could be improved is the development cycles because every six months a new version of Kubernetes is launched. Working in the infrastructure, I have found it quite difficult to keep up with infrastructure updates and new versions. Migrating the whole infrastructure from one Amazon EKS cluster to another is quite cumbersome, so if possible, version management should be made much easier than it is now, perhaps with some option to deploy code using blue-green updates. Creating a clone of the current infrastructure, updating it to the latest version, and terminating the old infrastructure would be a great enhancement.

I haven't used Amazon EKS's automated patching feature, but I believe it involves directly upgrading the AMI versions remotely or from the Amazon EKS dashboard. I understand it is a good feature, but I haven't used it yet.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for seven years in Kubernetes only, and I would say four years in Amazon EKS specifically.

My experience with the deployment and initial setup of Amazon EKS is usually straightforward. If you have the right Terraform code or the right knowledge, you can create it from the console or using Terraform or other tools; I don't find difficulties in starting a Kubernetes cluster. However, using the right principles or tools together with Amazon EKS may be challenging.

In terms of stability, Amazon EKS is pretty good. I don't encounter issues with stability if I use the right methods of deployment. For instance, using spot instances that are inexpensive can lead to downtime if not managed correctly.

My experience with customer service and technical support of AWS for Amazon EKS has been generally positive. Earlier, I was in developer support where the response time was maybe three to four hours after ticket submission, but I was able to resolve most problems with their support. I don't have any complaints.

I would rate technical support for Amazon EKS at an eight out of ten based on my experience with the developer support.

Positive

I have been using Amazon EKS for four years. In addition, I have used other solutions.

The integration of Amazon EKS with IAM is easy; if you have the right policy in place, you can create a role from the policy and then apply it to the application that you are using. It provides a way to use IAM to provision the software and infrastructure portions, as well as integrating application users into AWS IAM, making it very easy to implement if you know how to do it.

The influence of EKS's integration with other AWS tools on application development and management processes is significant; EKS itself is just the infrastructure. Application development requires the right tools with Amazon EKS, as it only provides a place to deploy things, and not the entire development cycle or management of workstations and servers. You must use something on top of Amazon EKS to fulfill the development cycle or CI/CD pipeline. Once the CI/CD pipeline is developed with Amazon EKS as the deployment platform, it becomes easy for developers to develop and test applications in the cluster.

I am not exactly sure about the pricing of Amazon EKS, but I think it is priced at the instance level, meaning EKS itself is not that high in price. However, whatever instances are used for Amazon EKS will determine the actual costs, particularly the traffic coming into the cluster.

Currently, I am not working with any software other than Amazon EKS, but we have plans to utilize some other applications, not just Amazon EKS, involving other services of AWS.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS an eight.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I use Amazon EKS for one of my customers when I am an independent contractor. They do video recording for events such as weddings, advertisements, and other occasions. They wanted to stream their content, and I advised them to use Amazon EKS as a good solution so they can easily ingest the raw materials, process it, do all the cuts using specific video software, and then publish it wherever they need.

The ease of implementation and integration was accomplished by writing some small scripts. I implemented workflows for data ingestion, sending it for cuts, and then directing it to the presentation layer. The simplicity of it was key.

The automated patching feature for the Kubernetes clusters provided valuable benefits through ease of maintenance and simplification of maintenance. I don't have to manually monitor or create any additional services for monitoring the patches; it's just there and does the work automatically.

From my perspective, integrating existing applications into a single workflow is beneficial for application development and application integration.

The workflows were straightforward, collecting data from raw recordings from cameras, putting them on cloud storage, ingesting them into video editing software, and going to a CDN for publishing.

About a year and a half ago, the cost was somewhat high. Though I wasn't directly affected as my customer paid for it, they complained about the billing. If they could reduce the price, that would probably attract more customers, especially from this industry, as they are rather small companies with limited budgets for such tooling.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for about a year and a half, with my first notes dating from March 2024.

I escalated a couple of cases to AWS support. I have mixed feelings about this as they were quite helpful, but the response times were quite long. It took them about five business days to get a response to my question, but when they replied, the response was very valuable and helped me.

I didn't notice any crashes, slowness, or performance issues with the Amazon EKS product. My client could have potentially experienced such issues while using it, but they never reported any complaints, so I don't believe there were any issues.

I would rate the tech support around seven or eight on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

I worked with container services about a year ago as part of my project at that time. I enjoyed using AKS, but I think its equivalent in AWS is better; it's more mature and easier to implement than AKS on Azure.

The best feature I found in Amazon EKS is ease of implementation. I'm not very knowledgeable about video software and had to learn it quickly for this specific project, and I found it very easy to implement. It probably took me a couple of hours to really understand it and learn how to use videos, and it was probably the easiest of all the solutions that I tried.

I use the DevOps server as software as a service on Azure. I didn't need to set any server for that; it was just there. I added it to my dashboard and started using it.

In terms of cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements, I've definitely seen returns on investment. Considering my rate and the couple of hours spent, rough calculations show around 30% return on investment.

The majority of my time setup cost was very affordable, taking just two hours. It was easy as I didn't have to worry about setting all the infrastructure underneath, just using what's there. This saved my time, allowing me to complete the project within several hours instead of days or weeks.

When I evaluated several solutions, Amazon EKS looked more intuitive to learn. I was prototyping for two hours each, and with Amazon EKS, I had this raw prototype running after around two hours. With other services, after two or three hours, I was still in the middle of my work with no visible effect, so that was the benefit.

I am working with a set of tools within the Azure toolbox. Azure is a huge collection of services with over 100 of them. I use virtual machines, Azure Functions for serverless processing, especially for creating APIs that do automated tasks. Additionally, I use SQL Server database and infrastructure as code, creating using Terraform, creating virtual private networks, setting up firewall rules to increase the security of my customer's solution.

I give Amazon EKS a rating of 8 out of 10.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I usually work with AWS tools focused on infrastructure deployments, onboarding new customers to the cloud, and offering the best practices across infrastructure, networking, security, monitoring, and availability, discussing high availability solutions and implementing the best practices over these. That's mainly my scope. For the development part, when it comes to services such as functions, Lambda functions and X-Ray and development services, I actually interfere with them in the deployment part and not for the configuration or the development part.

I've built a tool that can manage all these resources, whether it's on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services or Oracle itself. This tool is efficient when it comes to assessments, assessing the environments for customers, getting the best security practices and measurements across the environment the customer has, having a cost optimization component that can be used to optimize the cloud environment. It covers automated deployments that you use with a user interface, so you don't have to write any code while deploying complex scenarios.

Regarding my experience with Amazon EKS, I have a complete solution for deployment as well. The tool is really powerful and can be used to do various things. I'm involved in the infrastructure, networking, and deployment part, so deploying these resources is one of my daily responsibilities. I use this tool to deploy all of these.

The deployment process for Amazon EKS is straightforward; you don't have to do anything basically. You just have to get the right image and the normal operation for Amazon EKS.

The best features of Amazon EKS involve the orchestration, which may be the concerning part of each customer when it comes to Amazon EKS especially. The automation part, the deployment and monitoring part, the security as well, having the connectivity going private or public, or using Kubelet are various aspects that users should be aware of, providing good experience while discussing these options with customers.

The integration capabilities of Amazon EKS seem fine, but it can be challenging using AWS services compared to other cloud providers, for example, Microsoft Azure. From using both platforms, Microsoft Azure offers more simplicity while doing complex deployments. AWS offers the same solutions; however, it seems more complicated when it comes to independent resources, where you need to establish dependencies before doing the actual resource deployment. This part needs an automation layer that already exists with the Microsoft Azure portal, which facilitates everything for the user experience.

I don't see much room for improvement for Amazon EKS; the Kubernetes technology is the same across all cloud providers. Most customers focus on the main common features they will use, such as the monitoring or the orchestration part, which is their main concern when it comes to this service specifically.

I have experience using Amazon EKS for approximately six years.

Regarding technical support from Amazon, I never personally experienced it, but the team I'm handling has faced their support, and they indicated they're quite good, but not on the first level part.

Positive

I have definitely seen an ROI with Amazon EKS. I developed a tool for cost optimization that can cover all of these, even with better approaches than the cloud itself. The tool I developed uses the native AWS recommendations, so ROIs and any saving plans that can be offered are included within the cost optimization. However, we've added our experience component upon using these resources as well.

For example, AWS will never tell you that you have to delete a virtual machine or an EC2 instance. However, our report can detect the stopped instances and provide a recommendation for the customer that for cost saving, they can use a backup or snapshot for this machine, and delete it. If they need to restore it, they can do that, or they may have to remove it if they're not using it.

In terms of pricing for Amazon EKS, I think it's quite reasonable. If we compare the cost to other providers, with providers such as Oracle, it will be much higher in cost. When comparing it to Microsoft Azure, it seems similar, with some variations. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS a seven out of ten.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

From AWS, I use many services, but mostly my work revolves around Cloud Native, specifically Amazon EKS. Kubernetes is my area of focus and expertise. Most of my expertise is around Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies. This is why I don't call myself a full cloud offering expert, but I mostly focus on the Kubernetes usage with other OSS solutions around K8S. It's not really a niche; it's huge.

I handle both application workloads and data ingestion workloads.

Based on my experience, the best features are backed up with extensive security that AWS allows and EKS is firmly integrated into their entire AWS cloud offering. The second feature is the ability to do what we call an in-place upgrade (upgrading an existing cluster), which is a very strong capability. Additionally, the ability to integrate other add-ons such as service mesh exists, but I don't use it heavily. The ability to use all EC2 node options, including GPU options, works quite efficiently.

The freshness of the Kubernetes versions is the most interesting aspect around CSP's Kubernetes offering; it's about how close they are to the latest and greatest of Kubernetes. GCP is the leaders in that area, but Amazon is quite close behind, which is very important.

It is definitely helpful to streamline the application deployment process.

Regarding the flexibility part, if I want to use something such as Kong/Linkerd service mesh or other solutions, most of the CSPs bind you to their own solutions rather than allow other options to be made and integrated with, and this is what I mostly miss in their part.

In terms of built-in observability in Amazon EKS, I know it's mostly about the great integration with AWS itself. When I want to integrate it with any Grafana or Prometheus solution within AWS, things work efficiently with IAM. However, when I want to cross the boundary of the CSP, that becomes an issue. Integrating some open-source solutions works, but I need to work really hard for that.

The major area for improvement I've seen involves deep diving into one CSP with no equivalent solution elsewhere. The most important consideration is about the pricing and the flexibility of moving and building a multi-cloud environment for most customers. The issue is that when CSPs try to lock you in, flexibility becomes the most critical aspect.

Amazon aims to put you in a very Amazon-centric environment, but you need to be aware when you're using Amazon EKS that you're not locked in. The major paradigm for customers with maturity in using cloud solutions  is to avoid vendor lock-in. Most early adopters understand this, but the main mass, such as the banking companies I work with, aren't in the same state of mind; they need to build everything from a Cloud Native perspective with as much OSS as possible.

I am still using all these technologies.

I would rate stability as nine out of ten.

I would rate scalability for Amazon EKS as nine out of ten.

For technical support with a business plan, I would rate it as nine out of ten.

If support is not paid, I would rate it as six out of ten.

This difference is mainly because of the response time.

With business support, I rate the solution overall as nine out of ten.

Positive

Considering the pricing of the product, I think it's affordable because it's mostly about EC2 stuff, and the control plane is not too expensive, taking into account what they do behind the scenes. Managing my own stuff in an on-prem environment helps me say that it's quite inexpensive in that aspect. The control plane is cheap, but the pricing of EC2 remains the same. I mostly don't prefer using EKS Fargate - managed containerized environment because it makes the devops team dumber and allows vendor locked in; it prevents me from managing my own infrastructure - scaling and fine tuning of resources' usage. Using margate as Autopilot in GCP and other products makes me more inclined to be locked in since it provides many features without the need to think much, but eventually, that's how the CSP will lock you in.

The integrations with IAM and Elastic Load Balancing are fundamental aspects. EC2 is the most important integration, and IAM is very strong in Amazon EKS, stronger than in other clouds. However, I need to compare it regularly as this landscape changes daily. The ELB and all the load balancing capabilities are quite strong in Amazon architecture and Amazon EKS architecture as well, so it integrates efficiently. I miss the flexibility to use other options, but I understand why they integrated it so tightly into their platform.

This isn't only an Amazon issue; it also occurs on GCP and other platforms, including Azure.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use cases for Amazon EKS are securing the clusters and providing mesh gateways between the clusters.

The features that I find useful in Amazon EKS are Istio, Webhooks, service accounts, and ReplicaSets with different service accounts and accounts that we work with.

The main benefits that I received from using Amazon EKS are that it is a managed cluster and offers simplicity.

I am not the right person to ask what could be improved in Amazon EKS to make this tool better for the next release. A continuation of the managed pieces would be beneficial because there is no integration of clusters. They are all separate with no real managed cluster type of capability.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for about 3 and 1/2 to 4 years.

The initial setup for Amazon EKS is not straightforward. Kubernetes is not an easy technology because there are many technologies in the cluster. You need to understand infrastructure code to deploy it and understand all of the requirements alongside it. You cannot simply request deployment of EKS clusters as it does not work that way.

I would rate the setup for Amazon EKS as a three because I need to have other technologies and other tool sets to make it work. I cannot just go through Amazon's console and request a three-node cluster deployment because that does not work.

Regarding stability, Amazon EKS is stable. Once it is up, it works. I would rate it as a nine.

For scalability, Amazon EKS is scalable. I would rate it as a nine.

I have never contacted customer support for any issues on Amazon EKS.

Neutral

The solutions I evaluated before working with Amazon EKS include Grafana, Prometheus, K9s, Istio, and Consul.

The main benefits in Amazon EKS compared to those tools are that it is a different tool set completely, and they provide better visibility and connectivity.

The initial setup for Amazon EKS is not straightforward. Kubernetes is not an easy technology because there are many technologies in the cluster. You need to understand infrastructure code to deploy it and understand all of the requirements alongside it. You cannot simply request deployment of EKS clusters as it does not work that way.

I would rate the setup for Amazon EKS as a three because I need to have other technologies and other tool sets to make it work. I cannot just go through Amazon's console and request a three-node cluster deployment because that does not work.

I suggest understanding the entire form before understanding Kubernetes. I would rate Amazon EKS as a seven out of ten because Kubernetes across all CSPs is complicated. I do not think it is an easy technology to give it anything more than a seven.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon EKS is used as a container orchestration platform. Customers use it to develop applications which are containerized and need to be deployed. Kubernetes is the most popular platform across the industry.

Amazon EKS offers replatforming and migration capabilities to our customers, enabling them to move from AWS to other platforms like AKS with minimal changes. It has also helped in smooth integration with other AWS services, especially API gateways and databases.

The serverless capability of Amazon EKS is quite valuable. Earlier, it was necessary to know the exact configuration, including the number of pods and nodes. Now, with the serverless option, you can deploy everything and AWS handles the infrastructure.

Amazon EKS could improve in its pricing model, particularly for medium-sized customers who might find the support costs high.

I have used Amazon EKS for the past five to six years.

I rate the stability of Amazon EKS as ten out of ten. It is highly stable.

Amazon EKS has high scalability. It can scale very well according to needs, and it doesn't have any issues with scalability.

Amazon's technical support is quite good, especially for those who purchase support services. As a partner, we receive excellent support due to our relationship with Amazon.

Positive

The initial setup of Amazon EKS is much less complex compared to setting up Kubernetes manually on Linux virtual machines, as it takes away the complexities of installing and configuring everything.

We have experience working with both EKS from AWS and AKS from Microsoft Azure, as well as Google GKE.

For those who are Amazon customers and want to deploy containerized applications, Amazon EKS is the best option.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I deal with application development. I have used AWS services for configuring elastic search, deploying in pods, and using the CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins to build and deploy applications.

Amazon EKS allows upscaling and downscaling by reallocating resources. It is possible to configure everything, monitor applications, and perform routing in pods, securing the application with whitelisting. Datadog can be used to trace applications for performance issues or errors. It is an effective platform for cloud operations on AWS, similar to its counterpart on Azure.

There is room for improvement in making Amazon EKS less error-prone when writing on the YAML file. A UI could help generate config files, simplifying the process for developers who are not architects. It is very time-consuming, and companies often expect developers to do everything, which can be overwhelming.

I have used AWS for three or four years, specifically for Amazon EKS for two years.

It is not easy to configure Amazon EKS, and it requires very detailed attention to configuration and deployment. It can be error-prone and time-consuming to redeploy until a stable configuration is achieved.

Amazon EKS is effective for scalability, providing features for upscaling and downscaling resources as needed.

Their technical support team is good, but they do not instruct on what to do. Having to know what questions to ask is essential. The documentation is adequate but could include more practical insights.

Neutral

The pricing structure is beneficial for large companies who pay for what they use, but it is not affordable for startups. Offering a free version could help small companies.

Overall, Amazon EKS is a great technology, but the knowledge required to use it is scarce. It is a skill in itself, and developers must undertake multiple roles, which can be difficult. I rate Amazon EKS a seven because it is not easy for developers to configure without a solid base of knowledge.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The main reasons for using Amazon EKS in our use were third-party solutions that were distributed as Helm charts. We were using Rancher to manage multi-cloud deployment for unification. We are also using it for evaluation purposes, building customer pilots and prototypes. Sometimes it is easy to make the build chain run through and come out as images and deploy them into Kubernetes.

It completely depends on use case. If you have got a very dynamic or a requirement to scale very fast with nodes, then Amazon EKS is a very good choice because you have got that reach and the ability to scale quickly. But if you have got a fairly static load, it becomes quite expensive quite quickly. They are expensive CPU cycles.

The main benefit of Amazon EKS is its rapid deployment. The fact that we can deploy it very quickly with infrastructure as code and then tear it down again when we are finished.

There is no real advantage to us from Amazon EKS because the advantage is the fact that we have a unified management product so we can deploy concurrently into multiple clouds and on-prem out of one pane of glass. That is the key thing there. As far as the development and presentation, sometimes it is easy just to load it up through kube control, sometimes you put it through a GUI control in front.

We have not been using it from the point of the application using the IAM. We have been using it because quite often our customers are tied back to usually Entra ID and things like that.

The only concerns I had with Amazon EKS were related to cost, the usual problem you have with cloud. It is fine if you can exploit it for dynamic loads, bring it up, get rid of it again. That is where its strength is. You pay for that premium, but as far as running the thing under constant load, it is a very expensive way of deploying.

In the early days, there were a couple of vulnerabilities exploited from the single control plane per region. So there is nothing stopping me deploying multi-region, and that means multiple control planes. So I could deal with that, the infrastructure handled the criticality. The only thing that I could possibly run into a problem with, which I have not had to at this point, but architecturally, is with regulated technologies, banks, that sort of stuff where you cannot be single provider sensitive.

We have been dealing with it from the beginning almost, since 2019.

Only in the past I think it had issues. The fact that regions only had a single control plane left a little bit of vulnerability in there, certainly in the early days, but I do not think that matters now. They seem to have solved that.

I had no problem. It was stable. Very stable.

It was very easy to scale.

The current stuff I am working with has been Kubernetes and building out operational software using Kubernetes. I was actually reviewing Nutanix as an option for some of the stuff I was building out.

Mainly on-prem, we are doing production work with a number of customers. We support them, we run an operational arm as well. I have been involved in platforming on Kubernetes, but we happily support any variant. We are cloud agnostic. So these distributions, we would use Amazon EKS or AKS, but not for long.

The driver in Rancher, as long as I do not have anything extremely different or complex, works completely the same whether I am driving the application onto Amazon EKS or onto a local on-prem.

We have not been using the automated patching. If we were in anger, we do not run the stuff long enough in Amazon EKS at the moment. Really, it is just up in demo and then torn down again. A lot of the stuff is being driven from other automation anyway, more infrastructure as code stuff. So that actually just gets driven completely in there.

I think that Amazon, every other provider, is adapting to the changes in the market now because the major cloud benefits are now fully saturated. Nobody else is going in for those benefits. They are starting to hit the reality of regulated technologies that are high value cannot be under a single provider. So a single cloud provider is not sufficient to support critical industry anymore. You have to have either multiple cloud or hybrid just to meet regulation in the future. So that constrains some of the flexibility. But the clouds are all working towards more on-prem extension, that sort of thing to make it more feasible.

I would rate Amazon EKS a six out of ten. I have a particular penchant for not actually overscoring anymore because of the way that people use this stuff. In other words, I consider adequate doing what it says they claim it to do. So that is a five or a six as they did what they said they would do. There is nothing wrong with that. It is what we agreed. I paid for it, they delivered it. I am satisfied.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)