AWS EKS
Amazon EKS is AWS’s managed Kubernetes control plane. We rate it hold: the weakest of the major managed K8s options in our experience. Use only when the workload is already bound to AWS (VPC, IAM, RDS/LB integrations, compliance footprint). For greenfield clusters, prefer Google GKE on Google Cloud Platform.
Blurb
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises.
Summary
Why hold: control-plane cost per cluster, IAM/VPC wiring complexity, CNI and add-on versioning friction, and “managed” still leaves node patching, ingress, and security baselines on you. Teams often underestimate day-2 ops compared to GKE’s tighter integration with the platform that invented K8s.
When EKS anyway: mandated AWS-only estate, tight coupling to ALB/NLB, IAM roles for service accounts (IRSA) patterns already standardized, or multi-tenant AWS accounts where egress to another cloud is blocked.
Contain damage: Terraform (or equivalent) for clusters and add-ons; ArgoCD for GitOps; DevSecOps admission and image policies; avoid snowflake node groups; plan upgrades and add-on compatibility explicitly.
Details
| Topic | Notes |
|---|---|
| Compute | Managed node groups, self-managed, or Fargate; each trades cost vs. ops burden |
| Networking | VPC CNI IP consumption; plan subnets and prefix delegation early |
| Identity | IRSA for pod AWS API access; prefer over long-lived node instance roles |
| Alternatives | Google GKE for new multi-cloud or GCP-first platforms |
| Distro | EKS Distro / EKS Anywhere for on-prem parity; still AWS-flavored ops |
Aligns with parent AWS (hold): do not choose EKS because “we’re on AWS”; choose it only when K8s on AWS is the explicit requirement.