Amazon EKS Reviews

Amazon EKS is used for running any type of application, and it is one of the more stable platforms. We use everything in AWS, CloudFront, and we probably have a hundred applications in AWS.

Several of our platforms have transitioned to Kubernetes because it is more economical than some other methods, and we have lots of apps that use Kubernetes.

The deployment of Amazon EKS took time mainly because of the amount of stuff we had to move, such as old legacy applications and systems, which need changes every few years, and AWS is just better.

We have several applications that run in Amazon EKS.

The best features of Amazon EKS include Kubernetes, as several of our platforms have transitioned to Kubernetes because it is more economical than some other methods, and we have lots of apps that use Kubernetes.

The support for AWS tools integration with Amazon EKS has influenced our management process significantly. The cloud affects everything, with probably 80% of our stuff in the cloud, mainly in AWS.

The self-healing nodes with Amazon EKS help minimize administrative burdens, and while I'm not a system admin myself, I do disaster recovery testing and resiliency assessments for cloud applications.

Improvements could include better support and pricing, which is always important.

There are definitely areas for improvement with Amazon EKS.

My experience with AWS products spans the last six, seven years.

Amazon EKS is stable.

Amazon EKS scales effectively.

I would rank their support close to a 10; they are very responsive.

Positive

The initial setup with Amazon EKS is straightforward, and all of our teams are involved with AWS. Some use EC2 containers, and I've seen everything there is to see in AWS.

Amazon EKS is easy to use, and you don't experience the problems that you encounter with some solutions like EC2 containers or S3 buckets.

The support for AWS tools integration with Amazon EKS has influenced our management process significantly. The cloud affects everything, with probably 80% of our stuff in the cloud, mainly in AWS, though we have some in Google Cloud and Azure.

In my role, I don't set anything up; I set up test disaster scenarios and have teams practice against those scenarios. We have encountered challenges during that migration process, and we utilize our AWS dedicated person whenever something arises that we can't handle or don't understand, so we can seek their help.

Amazon EKS helps us manage complex workflows effectively.

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

I am an end user of Amazon EKS. As a software engineer, we are using Amazon EKS as a platform for deploying our applications.

The most valuable features of Amazon EKS that I have found include scalability, simplicity in operations and management, and some great features for optimizing cost. Those are probably the main advantages.

Speaking about scalability, it basically means that we are able to scale our workloads according to our needs, which is useful. Regarding cost optimization, sometimes infrastructure in AWS might be a little bit expensive, so having some functionality to get it more manageable and to have some cost reduction solutions in place is always useful. Additionally, not only Amazon EKS but the Kubernetes platform itself is a very popular platform, and many developers are familiar with it, making it convenient for the company to use. It is much easier for our developers to get any information about solving problems and developing applications because information is widely available.

I have seen a positive impact from Amazon EKS for my organization since deployment; it provides a very robust and cost-effective platform for deploying our applications. The Kubernetes platform is well known and widely available, which means there is a lot of information about it. Since it is a manageable solution, it removes a lot of the burden and headache of managing our own cluster on bare-bone hardware. While we do not rely heavily on Amazon infrastructure, I understand that if someone were to rely on it heavily, it would be much easier to integrate with Amazon EKS.

In my opinion, Amazon EKS could improve its plugin management; while Amazon offers some improvements, they often come at an extra cost. Compared to Google, for example, having the same cluster in Google Cloud is much easier because it hides all the complexity of managing Kubernetes add-ons and plugins. EKS is improving in this area, but it could still be smoother and better. Upgrade management is also a constant concern because EKS frequently forces users to upgrade, which can be inconvenient due to the risks involved in introducing something new, especially at the platform level.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for probably two or three years.

It is hard to say how Amazon EKS's self-healing nodes help me minimize administrative burdens since we have not had any issues with them in a Kubernetes environment. The Kubernetes platform provides capabilities to replace nodes, and everything just goes smoothly under the hood.

We do not use Amazon EKS's automated patching feature for our Kubernetes clusters.

Amazon EKS's support for AWS tools integration has not influenced my application development and management process much; we do not rely on any specific AWS features.

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

I have reached out to Amazon EKS support a few times in my previous project where we had a subscription plan for support, but in the current project, we have no business support.

My impression of Amazon EKS support is generally positive; my experience depends on the person on the other side, but the vast majority of cases involved very professional and skilled engineers. However, there was one instance where I was not completely satisfied with the answers received. Overall, I would rate them eight out of ten.

Positive

Before Amazon EKS, we used a different solution, specifically ECS and Elastic Container Service, and we still use it alongside offerings from other cloud vendors such as Google, as well as self-hosted clusters.

I personally participated in the initial setup and deployment of Amazon EKS. The setup process for Amazon EKS is fully automated, as we use Terraform for bootstrapping and managing our infrastructure, so there are no issues at all. Everything was straightforward with no challenges. The only thing I can remember, which is relevant for the previous question, is that when creating a Kubernetes cluster in the AWS web console, it does some changes under the hood, such as creating a default role for authentication. However, doing it through command line tools or automation with Terraform requires some manual steps, which is not very convenient.

I would like to optimize the Amazon EKS setup process in the future, but we probably will not take action because creating a new cluster is a rare task for us. Spending an extra 15 minutes on manual steps probably would not be worth the effort of full automation.

I do not have any metrics to measure the impact of Amazon EKS on my organization's ability to manage complex workflows efficiently.

I am aware of the pricing of Amazon EKS. I do not consider Amazon EKS an affordable solution; it is not cheap for sure, but it depends. For a small project, such as a personal project or a proof of concept, the cost is fairly noticeable. However, for a full production setup, I think the cost is manageable.

The main advantage for us in choosing Amazon EKS is the AWS infrastructure and the cloud ecosystem, including databases and compute instances, which is probably even more important than Amazon EKS itself.

I have not utilized Amazon EKS's integration with IAM.

I do not really integrate Amazon EKS with other AWS services; our current application would work with any Kubernetes platform, whether it is Amazon EKS, Google Cloud, or any other self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, most likely with some minor tweaks.

We do not use any specific Amazon EKS APIs or functionality, so I do not have anything to share about integration capabilities.

My personal rating for Amazon EKS is six out of ten, as it really depends on personal preference.

I use Amazon EKS for creating users, depending on the project I've worked on. I use it to update config maps and for role binding in the Kubernetes cluster. Additionally, I use it for creating namespaces and accessing different clusters, such as dev clusters.

Regarding integration with IAM in Amazon EKS, I use it primarily for creating IAM users and managing permissions for users.

While I cannot specify a single favorite feature in Amazon EKS, I particularly value the user creation and config map functionalities. Both processes are straightforward - creating users and updating the config map are easy tasks.

The main benefit of using Amazon EKS is that it makes work more efficient and enables faster delivery.

The main area for improvement in Amazon EKS relates to master node control. When setting up a Kubernetes cluster independently, you have access to the master, but with AWS, you do not have control over it.

The support team of Amazon EKS is excellent and very helpful. I have never experienced any issues with them.

Positive

We briefly used Google's solution before switching to Amazon EKS. After that brief period, we have exclusively used AWS.

For the initial setup of Amazon EKS, we typically follow established guidelines. In most cases, we are not responsible for creating it directly. We work through our Jira and Confluence systems, completing assigned tickets and projects rather than setting up the system from scratch.

The pricing of Amazon EKS varies depending on the size and specific requirements of individual companies or clients. Many companies choose AWS because of its competitive pricing. The prices are considered fair by most users.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon EKS a 9.

I use Amazon EKS for managing production environments. I have worked for different companies over the past three years, managing microservice applications on Amazon EKS to deploy application code to the environment, including the production environment. We use DevOps methodology to deploy these services.

The most beneficial aspect of Amazon EKS is that it helps manage the Kubernetes master node, so I don't need to maintain the master node, including tasks like upgrading. This allows me to focus on business code. If using services like Fargate, I only need to maintain my workload, simply uploading code that will be deployed to the Kubernetes cluster. This is especially beneficial for startup companies that lack the technical resources to manage the Kubernetes cluster. Furthermore, Amazon EKS allows me to utilize Kubernetes cluster-level expansion. If there’s insufficient resource on a machine, the cluster can automatically expand to add new nodes.

Although Amazon EKS is popular, there are areas for improvement. It could support more scenarios and plugins. Currently, some third-party plugins, like certain network plugins such as Weave CNI, might not be fully supported. 

I have been working with Amazon EKS for more than three years.

I haven't found any performance issues with Amazon EKS so far. To avoid potential performance issues, it is important to plan resources initially, ensuring there are enough compute resources like nodes to host applications.

Amazon EKS is very scalable, but scaling can sometimes cause trouble. When Amazon EKS scales up or down, there might be occasional intermediate pod interruptions, though it's rare.

I have escalated some questions to AWS tech support before. I once faced a random issue where a pod abruptly shut down and restarted. Upon escalation, AWS helped me find the root cause. Overall, I would rate AWS tech support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Azure AKS and some exposure to Google GKE. However, I mostly have experience with Amazon EKS.

When I first set up Amazon EKS, I faced challenges because there are different setup methods. Using the console does not align well with DevOps. It is better to use EKS CTL or Terraform's IAC tools. Configuring role permission policies is the most challenging part, ensuring Amazon EKS has access to different services or databases.

I have experience with Azure AKS and some exposure to Google GKE.

I would recommend Amazon EKS for large companies, especially banks, due to AWS's extended support for Amazon EKS, its availability, and reliability. Amazon EKS offers a strong solution as part of a full suite, but it should be integrated with services like Lambda for a complete solution. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS an eight because there is still room for improvement. The overall product rating is eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.