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Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Google Kubernetes Engine comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon ECS provides significant cost savings and ROI with reduced server expenses, auto-scaling, and a pay-as-you-go model.
Sentiment score
9.0
Google Kubernetes Engine offers cost-effectiveness, operational productivity, and flexibility, though competitor offerings affect ROI and challenge startups.
This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon ECS support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, yet feedback varies due to cost, knowledge gaps, and response times.
Sentiment score
5.5
Google Kubernetes Engine's customer support is mixed; some users find it satisfactory, while others rely on alternative solutions.
We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
Amazon ECS is highly praised for scalability, handling diverse workloads effectively, with minor regional and autoscaling challenges.
Sentiment score
8.5
Google Kubernetes Engine offers scalable, efficient, and flexible resource management for various applications, including machine learning on cloud platforms.
Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Amazon ECS is highly rated for stability and performance, achieving up to 99.99% uptime, with infrequent user-related issues.
Sentiment score
8.3
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for stability, frequent updates, scalability, seamless integration, and high satisfaction ratings, despite minor challenges.
The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon ECS needs improved management, user experience, pricing transparency, security, integration, support, auto-scaling, reliability, and intuitive interface.
Google Kubernetes Engine needs improved security, integration, user-friendliness, monitoring, pricing, and application-level security for better user experience.
Currently, when scaling with Amazon Elastic Container Service, I have to choose between monitoring CPU or memory usage to scale up or scale out; there is no option to monitor both simultaneously.
When it comes to new-age services around AI, particularly in the areas of LLMs and genomics, these services are not fully available in our region's availability domain.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Elastic Container Service offers variable, usage-based pricing, appreciated for cost-effectiveness despite potential regional and configuration-related cost variances.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers flexible, open-source pricing based on resource usage, competitive with AWS, affecting costs for high availability.
Our customers often do a trade-off between requiring services at particular SLA levels and being willing to pay a premium price to us as partners.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Elastic Container Service is scalable, cost-effective, easy to use, with seamless AWS integration and flexible deployment options.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers easy deployment, auto-scaling, robust security, seamless cloud integration, and efficient resource and traffic management.
It inherently offers scalability by default, without our IT teams needing to take the extra load to make the services available for our end users.
Amazon Elastic Container Service makes horizontal scaling easy and is especially effective when working under the ECS service.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
What I find most valuable is the ability to focus solely on my product without worrying about the Kubernetes infrastructure itself.
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Container Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

FABIO NAGAO - PeerSpot reviewer
Horizontal scaling is streamlined when deploying modern workloads
Currently, when scaling with Amazon Elastic Container Service, I have to choose between monitoring CPU or memory usage to scale up or scale out; there is no option to monitor both simultaneously. This limitation makes it challenging to define a balanced scale-out automation since a well-written software should balance between processing and memory.
Abhilash Gopidas - PeerSpot reviewer
The auto-scaling feature helps during peak hours, but the support is not great
The product has no downtime. Automated scaling is a valuable feature. During peak hours, the datasets are on a higher volume. We need scaling in place. Otherwise, there's a degradation in the performance. We might sometimes miss data, or there will be no data sync between systems. Auto-scaling helps deal with performance needs during peak hours. There's no lag time for processing data.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Container Service?
Implementing the product has helped me monitor the parameters. I utilize tools like CloudWatch and AWS systems to track these parameters. If any issues arise, I alert our developer team to address ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Container Service?
The solution must improve backup and compatibility around OS like Windows and Mac.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive, so we now use spot machines.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
Gemini could be more integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine ( /products/google-kubernetes-engine-reviews ). For example, it would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
GKE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind
Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Container Service vs. Google Kubernetes Engine and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.