Amazon EKS Reviews

I'm actually working for a company that uses AWS as a cloud platform, and for our clients, we use Amazon EKS. We utilize multiple clusters and other requirements, making Amazon EKS our choice for deployment service or orchestration service.

The usual use case for Amazon EKS is to deploy an application intended for heavy user load and traffic. In technical terms, there are multiple services to choose from, but we choose Amazon EKS for its orchestration, load balancing, and auto-scaling capabilities. With this service, you don't have to worry about manual auto-scaling or manual load balancing. Before Kubernetes, manual intervention was needed for scaling applications, leading to potential crashes if capacity was exceeded. Amazon EKS alleviates those concerns with its auto-scaling feature, where predefined thresholds automatically trigger the launching of additional resources to handle increased traffic. Also, Amazon EKS allows configurations such as minimum and maximum server requirements, ensuring scalability while minimizing costs.

The features of Amazon EKS that I find most valuable include load balancing, auto-scaling, networking, security, and scalability.

Scalability in Amazon EKS refers to the ability to automatically scale up or down your application based on traffic needs. For instance, if you initially expect 10 users but suddenly have 20, Amazon EKS automatically handles the scaling, thereby preventing application crashes and maintaining service availability.

Reliability is crucial when running an application on Amazon EKS, as it ensures your application never crashes. With Amazon EKS, you don't manage the infrastructure yourself; Amazon takes care of it all. You simply need to deploy your container, select the required configurations, and Amazon EKS handles the rest without requiring you to manage the underlying resources.

I have utilized Amazon EKS's integration with IAM, which stands for identity and access management. IAM restricts access to services, ensuring only authorized personnel can access certain capabilities. This prevents mistakes or unauthorized actions, maintaining security throughout the platform.

The support for AWS tools integration in Amazon EKS influences our application development and management significantly. With integrated features related to security, scalability, and billing, we ensure the efficiency of our processes. At my company, we manage around 600 clusters on Kubernetes and emphasize reliability by integrating Amazon EKS with various third-party applications. This integration aids in deployment, security, and ultimately, efficiency, as it ensures that applications remain available and perform efficiently.

One area of Amazon EKS that could be improved is the manual process for adjusting the number of nodes. When I've already defined configurations in Docker or YAML files, it seems unnecessary to go back and make similar adjustments in the console.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for 4.7 years.

I do not often communicate with the technical support and customer service of Amazon EKS.

Negative

Currently, I am using GKE in Google Cloud, which is similar to Amazon EKS. The differences between GKE, Amazon EKS, and AKS mainly come down to minor functional variations; overall, they provide similar capabilities.

Regarding the pricing and licensing of Amazon EKS, I am not entirely certain, but from my perspective, it's somewhat comparable to AWS's compute instances. While it may be on the pricier side due to being a managed service provided by Amazon, the features and functionalities justify the cost, especially for applications requiring reliability and scalability.

I participate in the setup and deployment of Amazon EKS, though I don't do it directly through the console. I use a third-party application called Argo CD, which allows me to deploy Kubernetes applications without accessing the Amazon console directly, making the process efficient and straightforward.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The main use cases for Amazon EKS are that we use it normally in some new projects to optimize our costs. Instead of having many ECS services running, we prefer to set up a Kubernetes cluster and set everything there. For me, it is primarily for optimizing our resources.

What I find valuable about Amazon EKS is that it helps us manage all the Kubernetes. It isn't the workload, it is the main part of the Kubernetes, the head of all the cluster. Automatic updates are available, and we can set everything we created in AWS in Kubernetes, including IAM configuration. We can create policies such as creating a private endpoint for S3. The integration of Kubernetes with the AWS ecosystem is the best feature that Amazon EKS provides.

The IAM integration in Amazon EKS helps enhance the authentication processes because we can do this in a more granular way. Using IAM, you can set exactly what the service needs. If a service or application needs to upload objects or data to S3, connect to RDS, or perform other tasks, using IAM is the easiest way. The benefit is that it works in a granular way and it's easy to set up and validate. When you examine the permissions and rules to ensure everything has the correct permission at the correct moment, using IAM is perfect because you can validate and set up everything effectively.

Amazon EKS's support for different AWS tools integrations has accelerated our application development because we can think about all aspects comprehensively. We can architect using AWS services and objects, and Amazon EKS accepts this seamlessly. We don't need to translate the idea for AWS. We can write this idea using AWS objects and services, and Amazon EKS corresponds to that. It accelerates projects and is easy to manage because we can use Terraform to implement it.

I am using the self-healing nodes in the Amazon EKS solution. We have a client with a production workload running on spot instances. When a spot or node crashes, Amazon EKS starts a new node and moves everything before the node stopped. This self-healing is excellent because we don't experience disruptions. We don't face situations where a node stops and we need five minutes to start a new one. We use it in specific environments and can observe the difference when enabling or disabling Amazon EKS self-healing.

We are utilizing the automated patching in Amazon EKS. The valuable benefits I have experienced using the automated patching feature for the Kubernetes clusters directly increase security. Kubernetes typically releases patches focused on security rather than new features. It's beneficial because we can focus on our work without constantly thinking about new patch releases or upgrade deployments. Amazon EKS handles this automatically for us.

We face some issues with Amazon EKS when using the node group to control which nodes can start. We have a limitation where we need to set just one kind of instance - only large instances, only small instances, or only extra-large instances. This is a problem. It would be beneficial if we could specify that certain containers or services start on small instances rather than large ones.

I am uncertain whether Amazon EKS supports all LTS versions, and I think this would be something beneficial. Additionally, AWS has great AI features, so when we need to make updates to Amazon EKS, it would be helpful if AI could assist with planning, identifying migration requirements, and considering costs.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for about two years in production. Including study time and other experiences, I have been involved with it for approximately four years.

I faced challenges in the initial stages with Amazon EKS. The main challenge is that when we set up the cluster, it appears as a huge infrastructure just for a small application. When you set up Amazon EKS, it is configured at a large scale by default. You can't start small and gradually expand. This makes sense because for smaller applications, ECS works effectively. If you want a more integrated ecosystem, you can use Amazon EKS. The challenge lies in migrating everything, as you can't start using Amazon EKS on a small scale. It typically requires a big cluster with one, two, or three nodes. We also faced challenges with developers needing to adapt their mindset to the new way of doing things.

I have escalated questions to the technical support of Amazon EKS two or three times, and they always provided good solutions. When we don't understand the questions, we schedule a call to demonstrate the issue, and we always receive the correct answer.

I reached out for technical support with Amazon EKS because we faced issues starting a service. The way we declared the services was incorrect, but we weren't aware of this. We called AWS support for assistance. Another issue involved a security problem that we identified and reported to AWS.

I would rate the technical support of Amazon EKS a 10. The documentation is good, and when human interaction is needed, it's readily available.

Positive

From my perspective, I don't see any disadvantages of Amazon EKS compared to competitors in the market. Amazon EKS represents the state of the art. While Google has a powerful engine that offers more granular control, the additional configuration can be overwhelming. Amazon EKS balances the power of custom configuration with ease of setup.

I find the pricing of Amazon EKS complicated because I live in Brazil, where we use reals. With the exchange rate and taxes, the price appears six times higher. However, when viewed in dollars, it offers great features at reasonable pricing. Lower prices are always beneficial, and a reduction in hourly cost or promotional discounts would be appreciated, but the current price-to-benefit ratio is worthwhile.

My advice to other organizations considering Amazon EKS for their environment is to plan carefully. I strongly recommend planning and reading the documentation because Amazon EKS is resourceful and typically offers multiple ways to accomplish the same task. Careful planning, reviewing case studies for comparison, and thoughtful migration to Amazon EKS are worthwhile investments. Overall, I rate Amazon EKS a 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I have a total of around four years of experience in multiple clouds, especially in AWS, and many times I used Amazon EKS for our multiple products and projects.

In our environment, we already have all the other infrastructure and services running on AWS, so we benefit from using Amazon EKS because the other services can easily communicate with it. For example, some of our services need to access S3, and our application objects reside there, so we can easily integrate them with Amazon EKS. We also use IAM rules for integration to provide granular access to resources. As per your question, in our environment, most of our clients and resources reside in AWS, which is why we prefer to deploy other services there, as most of our development environment uses Lightsail. This gives us an edge, allowing us to easily move from development to staging or production environments within the same cloud.

When we compare other clouds, AWS has an edge among all the crowded options right now. My observations and reviews with AWS also affirm this because it provides a user-friendly experience and offers many options that other clouds do not provide. When my team and I work with AWS, we always feel comfortable. I do not know the exact reason behind it; maybe we have a lot of previous experience, and we are familiar with AWS. That is why other reviews from my colleagues at previous companies indicate that AWS has some edge compared to other clouds.

I would recommend Amazon EKS to other organizations because it provides simple configuration, easy management, safety, granular access, and vast monitoring capabilities where we can easily monitor our clusters using CloudWatch. However, I would think about a clearer dashboard for Amazon EKS, but overall, I think it is sufficient.

When we need to deploy the application, we require a large number of instances. Therefore, I hope and believe I will not face out-of-capacity issues in AWS, especially since I have not yet experienced traffic around 50,000 plus, and I believe I will not face such issues in Amazon EKS the next time we deploy with a large number of nodes and worker nodes.

Additionally, the upgradation process of Kubernetes rapidly rolls out new releases, so it should be easier for our production environment to upgrade Amazon EKS clusters. Sometimes when we are going to upgrade the Amazon EKS cluster, we need to check the backups, and we should have options to export our configurations, such as exporting the configuration to S3 or somewhere else to find backups. Other tools, such as Velero, provide this functionality to back up configurations, so I hope this backup process will help us fulfill our backup policies and other requirements.

For the pricing aspect of Amazon EKS, one specific issue arises when we deploy applications, especially as we provide SaaS services to our clients. We would like to know the cost for each customer, but we face issues because AWS charges $70 USD for the Amazon EKS engine. We struggle to divide the worker nodes' fees and the engine cost among clients, as some users have low traffic and visibility while others have large amounts of visibility and traffic. Thus, we face cost-related issues when running multiple customers on the same Amazon EKS cluster.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

The initial setup and deployment of Amazon EKS was straightforward; I easily provisioned the correct cluster. Sometimes, due to the depreciation of the AMIs, AWS provides warnings to use the latest version of the EKS AMIs because some of our scripts or Terraform scripts are old. I think it is good practice for AWS to provide messages to the console to upgrade your cluster, but overall, my experience with provisioning the Amazon EKS cluster is good, and I highly appreciate it.

I have not faced any issues that require escalation to customer support, and until today, I do not feel any need to escalate anything to the support team. I am happy with the service.

To meet our requirements, our services need a large amount of CPU and memory, so we need high-spec machines. When we deploy applications, we require a large number of instances.

I have not faced any issues that require escalation to customer support, and until today, I do not feel any need to escalate anything to the support team. I am happy with the service.

Positive

I also work with other clouds, such as Oracle Cloud, but I feel comfortable with AWS because I faced some issues, such as out of capacity when we designed the infrastructure for our large traffic.

The initial setup and deployment of Amazon EKS was straightforward; I easily provisioned the correct cluster. Sometimes, due to the depreciation of the AMIs, AWS provides warnings to use the latest version of the EKS AMIs because some of our scripts or Terraform scripts are old. I think it is good practice for AWS to provide messages to the console to upgrade your cluster, but overall, my experience with provisioning the Amazon EKS cluster is good, and I highly appreciate it.

I used Amazon EKS through its console rather than through the AWS Marketplace.

I have not checked the pricing yet, but I will look into it to see if EKS brings ROI or a return on investment for us.

Regarding self-healing nodes in Amazon EKS, I have not worked on that self-healing feature.

For automated patching in Amazon EKS, I have not used that feature.

Regarding disadvantages of Amazon EKS compared to competitors in the market, I think every cloud provider has the same Kubernetes engine and worker nodes. However, I believe AWS provides a more user-friendly environment, which is why many of our customers are trying to deploy their infrastructure or applications on AWS. I do not think there is any specific reason not to prefer Amazon EKS.

I have not integrated IAM tools with Amazon EKS yet, but my other teams have. I think they used Okta, but I'm not certain about it. I have some demos from a long time ago, but I think Okta is for SSO.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We have integrated with IAM. We haven't used it in production now, but we are still in the research and development stage. We are planning to use the Amazon EKS hybrid solution by using our own data center virtual machine on our Amazon EKS clusters. A hybrid cluster would be a great solution for us since we have many resources here, and we want to utilize our cloud service. We are still in research and development solution. The only use case I can remember integrating IAM with Amazon EKS is the hybrid work for nodes.

We wanted to easily integrate our on-premise nodes with Amazon EKS to fully utilize the cloud service with our already persistent on-premise nodes. The major use case was that we wanted to host calls where the latency has to be in one digit. We can't have a call here in Mongolia jump from the Hong Kong AWS server and jump back to us. That would be a terrible experience for our users. We would have to implement the one-digit latency solution within our country, so we have to utilize the on-premise data center nodes. That was a bit of a challenge for us. Other than that, it's usually great.

For scaling our application, ensuring high availability and cost saving with Amazon EKS, the automatic load operation, no maintenance, and all features are really nice for our business.

In our old cluster, we were using on-premise Kubernetes. We had some downtimes here and there, with downtime being a monthly occurrence to our business. When we switched to Amazon EKS, we haven't faced any downtime in two years so far. That means no stop business growth for our type, and we can continue focusing on our business agility. The maintenance, configuration, and maintenance of our cluster has never been needed. We can update our Kubernetes cluster versions by just clicking one button. Before that, it was a long and tedious task. We would have to do it during nighttime operations. Operations are minimized and downtimes are non-existent now. Adding nodes and removing nodes are automatic so we could save costs there too.

The application supply chain integration has never been easier with Amazon EKS. We have integrated Amazon EKS into the CICD pipeline. Our developers are just pushing our code to our repository, and a few minutes later, it's deployed in Amazon EKS.

Mostly, it's just minimizing the manual preparations and increasing our business time with Amazon EKS so we can focus more on improving our applications and researching new ways to improve our business side. This means less time on the system side manual configuration and more time on making our applications better for our users.

We haven't fully utilized self-healing nodes in Amazon EKS yet. The self-healing nodes are still in our research and development stage. It is new we are using in production clusters.

We have been working with Amazon EKS for two years in our company now.

The Amazon EKS itself is great. We haven't had an issue with that.

We asked customer service regarding a wrong charge on our billing account, but I haven't initiated a request ticket, so I'm not very familiar with it. Our DevOps team had started the process. We reached out to them before.

It was really positive. The customer support was nice, informative, and very helpful.

Positive

I think it's reasonable. The EP two nodes are a bit expensive on the side. Other than that, Amazon EKS is pretty reasonable for its price.

We researched the pricing and how much it would cost in a month, so we are aware of the pricing.

Other than Amazon EKS, there's also GKE, the Google solution, and the Microsoft Azure solution and also OpenShift. We considered Amazon EKS because it's the most popular and widely available one. We opted for Amazon EKS because most of our engineers are familiar with the AWS environment.

We will apply it because it's easy to get out. We can easily integrate it in your application. It also has the most documentation out there. I would advise it.

Currently, we are just following the best practices with Amazon EKS. We follow the usual best practices or workflow with Amazon EKS and load balancing.

In comparison, the latency is a bit high with Amazon EKS. When we were researching about a year ago, Google offers almost forty milliseconds delay to Mongolia, as Amazon EKS in Hong Kong offers sixty milliseconds delay. That was the only downside from not choosing Google over Amazon EKS. Other than that, Amazon EKS has a lot of services.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My usual use cases for Amazon EKS are for my company's projects, as they instructed us to set up Amazon EKS and then deploy the applications.

I use Amazon EKS mainly for my company's projects, where we deploy applications according to company requirements.

The features and capabilities of Amazon EKS have proven to be valuable, as we use EKS in most of our projects. Our company has selected AWS as one of our three cloud preferences, which are AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The specific features I find most useful in Amazon EKS include the ability to deploy our applications directly using the pipeline file in YAML, the capacity to create multiple instances, and the capability to scale as per the requirement.

Amazon EKS's self-healing nodes help minimize administrative burdens in my organization by automatically creating a new node if any node crashes, allowing us to manage only the minimum and maximum nodes as needed.

To use Amazon EKS, we create the cluster first, and then we deploy the applications using the YAML file.

I have not used the automated patching feature for my Kubernetes clusters in Amazon EKS yet.

I think if new features, especially AI capabilities, are developed for Amazon EKS, it will enhance the product as it allows us to continually improve our applications.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for the past three years.

I participated in the initial setup and deployment of Amazon EKS.

My impression is that Amazon EKS is very stable and reliable as a product.

I have not noticed any outages, delays, or downtime with Amazon EKS; everything operates smoothly.

Amazon EKS is easy to evaluate in terms of scalability; we can auto-scale easily as needed.

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

I do not often communicate with the technical support of Amazon EKS as I have not needed their assistance.

For our work with Amazon EKS, we utilize the available documentation and guides, which are useful for understanding and starting with any AI tool or prompt.

I am satisfied with the documentation that Amazon offers.

Neutral

Amazon EKS was my first Kubernetes platform. Prior to that, I had only used Minikube locally, and after that, I have worked exclusively with Amazon EKS.

During the setup process for Amazon EKS, I set it up locally by configuring AWS config, and then I focused on the necessary setups like kubectl.

To start working with Amazon EKS, I first configure it with AWS, install kubectl, and then begin working after creating the cluster.

I chose Amazon EKS to work with because I have not yet started using GCP's or Azure's Kubernetes services. I have experience only with Amazon EKS so far.

I have only worked on one application in Amazon EKS, so I haven't fully developed it. I have only deployed the front end, and I think I need to gather more knowledge about EKS.

The interface of Amazon EKS is very good, but I prefer to use the CLI for creating clusters. I initially used the UI just once to understand everything before starting to create using the CLI only.

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

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

There are migration projects where we need to migrate some on-premise services to Kubernetes. In that case, we have used Amazon EKS to migrate our workload. There are two production services that we need to deploy on the cloud, so we chose to use Amazon EKS to deploy them on the servers.

There are multiple node clusters that we have within Amazon EKS. We have different node groups that we have used. Some of them are high performance, some have high-speed hard disks, and some have high CPU. There are multiple node groups that we have provisioned and also enable the scaling within the pod level and within the cluster level. There are multiple features that we have used along with node management.

For streamline, we need to apply GitOps within Amazon EKS. Whenever there is a commit in the deployment-related stuff, we need to deploy the new image on the image repository, and from there, we need to update the kubectl YAML files with the new image tag. We can also choose the Helm charts based, and we can also choose Argo CD for the automated deployments.

We have implemented two things with Amazon EKS. First of all, OIDC-based connectivity between the AWS services to the Kubernetes workload. Additionally, we implemented RBAC. We have used RBAC to provision IAM users to have proper security and a constrained environment so that read-only users can only read the things.

We have used Amazon EKS Anywhere for on-premises deployments, and within Amazon EKS, it has an air-gapped environment where we can deploy the things and manage the local type of Kubernetes.

Managing the production workload in Amazon EKS is highly valuable. It has many features, for example, self-healing, automatic deployment, rollouts, and better management. It is an Amazon managed service, so we need to just focus on the cloud itself.

We have installed Prometheus and Grafana within our Amazon EKS, and we have used DataDog operators as well to have proper production workload management and monitoring management system. We can see the logs, alerts, and everything related to it. We have integrated Slack and email addresses through SES. This is how we are monitoring our production workloads and get alerts based on problems within our production.

The main benefits from using Amazon EKS include it being a well-tested product that we can use to deploy our workload. Its management system is very efficient. We can deploy things very easily and resolve our issues efficiently. It has deep AWS integration and a managed control plane. It has built-in IRSA-based security model for IAM roles. We have flexibility and portability. We can use Helm, Argo CD, Flux CD, Istio, and Linkerd. We can use multiple EC2 machines, such as spot instances and Graviton-based instances that are GPU-powered. These features help us use Amazon EKS for our production environments.

I would appreciate seeing integration between the other services in Amazon EKS. For example, there are now more managed Prometheus and managed Grafana services available last year. I would appreciate knowing more about how AI-based services get integrated with Amazon EKS and what kind of AI automation, healing, or troubleshooting services Amazon will introduce in upcoming releases.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for three to four years.

The setup of the Amazon EKS environment is quite fairly simple, and we can easily automate them using Terraform as well.

Once everything is set and done, there is no maintenance required, which is a very good point.

I did not see any crashes, downtime, or performance issues with Amazon EKS.

We have enabled the cluster-level enablement and auto-scaling in Amazon EKS, and that helped us significantly. Whenever we have peak time, it will automatically manage the node for us, and there are more nodes to manage our workload.

For a few of the cluster upgrades that got stuck, we connect with Amazon tech support, as we have business support with Amazon. We connect with them, and we figure out the problem. They help us to troubleshoot the issue, and we run commands related to Cordon or Taint. With this, we complete our upgrades process.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the technical support and customer service of AWS as eight to nine. They are very technical, and they can easily fix things within 20 to 30 minutes.

Positive

I worked with on-premise Kubernetes, and I also worked with Azure Kubernetes, AKS.

I have worked extensively with Amazon EKS, and I have automation scripts ready. Whenever a new client comes to me, I request them to see my previous portfolio, and I show them my Amazon EKS work and how quickly I can set up their Amazon EKS and run the CI/CD so that their workload can get migrated to Amazon EKS. It is quite easy for me now to advocate for Amazon EKS.

We have a big business up and running in Amazon, and we have different AWS accounts: dev, test, and prod. Based on that, there is a root account who is paying the prices for us. The workload and the profit that we are getting, we are satisfied with what it is offering.

The pricing of Amazon EKS depends upon the node group that we are choosing and what kind of auto-scaling that we have implemented. It is totally dependent on those things, including what kind of network bandwidth that we are consuming.

I find the pricing of Amazon EKS reasonable. We actually are going to pay a yearly advanced payment, which helps us save on cost.

Amazon EKS has strong integration with its services. In Azure Kubernetes, it does not have strong, deep integration with its services, for example, Active Directory, Azure Registry, Azure Monitor. Both have their managed control plane and node management. Amazon EKS has a different pricing model - it is per cluster control plane level, whereas AKS is not on the control plane fleet's history. Regarding security, Amazon EKS provides IRSA-based, IAM role-based security, whereas AKS provides directory, Azure Active Directory.

It is a very well-known product, and there are many clients in the market who are using Amazon EKS, so it is the best service offered from AWS. I rate it a nine out of ten.

At the moment, whatever is required in Amazon EKS is already there.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I have been working in my current field since I work in the cloud, and I worked for AWS and for Amazon EKS because all of my customers are using Amazon EKS or application container solutions.

My use cases for Amazon EKS involve working for an AWS partner, one of the biggest in LATAM, where we have many customers or clients around the world with different solutions. I have a client that had many applications in Amazon EKS, and I had the full administration of the cluster. I manage not only networking, pods, or resources but also security, monitoring, the billing for the expenses, access to the cluster, and to the AWS account. I think that is a big field that I can handle within Amazon EKS.

What I appreciate most about Amazon EKS is that I use tools such as Datadog for monitoring and reporting, and if I have a problem with the cost, I use Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, as this Prometheus package is cheaper than Datadog. I use Helm to install packages or applications, making it easier and secure to install, uninstall, or update them. I also use Argo CD for CI/CD workflows. In general, these are the main package solutions that I use for Amazon EKS.

Regarding the downsides of Amazon EKS, I remember a case where I used a network add-on different from what is provided by AWS because the pods request one IP address for each pod. The solution had many pods, and the blocks in the VPC were limited. I didn't have enough addresses to assign to the pods, and I had to change the add-on to handle the IP address using another third-party solution not from AWS. This was one of the first challenges I encountered with Amazon EKS.

Since then, AWS still hasn't fixed this issue or given me an opportunity to use the IPs that I needed.

Basically, the problem was that we did not have enough IP addresses for the pods, and we had to change the network add-on in Amazon EKS.

I have been using Amazon EKS in my career for three and a half years since I worked in the cloud.

It took me approximately one month to learn how to use Amazon EKS. The tricky part was implementing Amazon EKS cluster completely from Terraform, as creating all of the resources is challenging. If you create the cluster from the AWS console, many resources are created behind the scenes, but in Terraform, you must create each resource one by one, which was quite difficult. Overall, it took about one month.

Regarding stability, I have not experienced any lagging, crashing, downtime, or instability with Amazon EKS. I think that Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes in general, is stable. I have had problems with billing because it's expensive, but not with stability.

When it comes to scalability, I use Carpenter with Amazon EKS because it is a tool that offers significant granularity for configuration, and it works really well and fast. The inherent scalability of Kubernetes is not the best for me based on resources, but Carpenter works really nicely.

I have contacted the technical support of Amazon EKS when I had issues with the IP addresses, and they helped me solve it by installing another network add-on. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give the support of Amazon EKS a nine because it was nice and fast.

Positive

I have used a direct alternative to Amazon EKS, which is ECS in AWS. I have many clients using ECS, Elastic Container Service, which is the native service for containers in AWS. It's not the same as Amazon EKS; it's another orchestrator, but it works fine when your application is not big.

The initial deployment with Amazon EKS was easy, but I remember that my first deployment was done with a YAML file, just using kubectl. I used kubectl run and the YAML file, and after that, I learned about Argo CD, which made the process much easier.

Amazon EKS does require maintenance on my end. Last year, Kubernetes had many updates, which was a difficult task. This is why I use Helm to install all of the applications in the cluster. If the application is built for you, you can create the Helm chart for this application and install it using this tool. I think that is the best option when you need to update the cluster. I know that AWS now offers many new applications add-ons included in the console, making it easier, but I still think that maintenance is one of the most complicated aspects of the cluster.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon EKS a nine.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are going to be using Lambda on the AWS Stack. We are migrating all our on-premises applications to AWS.

Eggplant is going to be on the AWS platform soon. We are using Lambda functions and CloudWatch for monitoring. We are also using Elasticsearch and ELK.

After we move all the applications to the cloud, we're going to move them into Amazon EKS as containers for easy management. It would be the same as how we are using EC2 instances, but in this case, we're going to move all applications to run on containers, Amazon EKS containers.

We use it for common file sharing across applications. I'm not really sure about all aspects as I didn't use it much. We just set it up to make sure all applications can read. The main capability is allowing different applications to access the same file or resources at the same time, providing collaboration capabilities.

The whole platform is easy because once you set it up, it's easy to onboard applications. It's easy to troubleshoot, run multiple clustering, log management, and perform troubleshooting. You can also install other applications, third-party applications, integration, and all that.

It helps with having dedicated nodes for certain functions. If you want to segregate the work instead of using all the nodes, you're able to align and assign which node processes specific applications, jobs, pods, or runs certain pods.

It reduces the deployment time, setup time, configuration time, and is cost-effective. It's very highly scalable.

The main challenge is at the beginning when you're still learning how to set up. The initial setup and knowing how to do it the first time can be challenging.

We had some challenges with the network pods. There were several pods that we had to try plugins for network, and the load balancing for the application we were deploying was quite difficult to manage.

The documentation should be easier to understand for beginners. It needs to be straightforward and easily grouped together because information tends to be scattered.

Some features required a lot of command line changes, especially setting up ingress and load balancers. If there could be a way to do that on a GUI, that would be easier. Having more configuration options on the UI, especially for setting up load balancers and ingress controllers, would be beneficial.

We have been using the solution for three months.

Currently, we haven't really automated the deployment. We are using Jenkins for our work.

Microsoft tools are being used in the bank.

We haven't experienced any scalability issues.

The support is quite friendly and very helpful. The Amazon support is very helpful and very responsive.

Positive

The main challenge is at the beginning when you're still learning how to set up. The setup and knowing how to do it the first time can be challenging.

I can recommend using it to save costs and for faster deployment, better performance, security, and easy clustering. It's easy to set up, manage, and monitor because when it goes down, it's easy to identify issues. Troubleshooting is straightforward, unlike other applications where you have to do a lot of digging to find the root cause. With this solution, you can see problems directly on your dashboards.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)