Amazon EKS Reviews

The value is for me that it's a community product. We don't have to rely on the ECS services. 

What is new right now is Fargate. Fargate has the ability to abstract from the clusters. Amazon said that using the cluster is too complicated for people. Therefore, what they do right now is they have a service that sits on top of the cluster that doesn't even know it's a cluster. It abstracts it for you. Fargate is the ability to deploy it into the cluster, which specifies what you want to deploy and it takes care of the cluster provisioning and deployment for you. The tool just abstracts you away from the cluster, so you don't even know that you're using a cluster, which is good for people that don't want to learn the technology, the infrastructure.

The solution is easy to use. You don't have to care about the servers or the cluster. You really just say, I want to deploy this application A. You just find the application, click a button, and Fargate deploys it to a cluster for you.

They really want to get away from the idea that you made your own cluster. They really want to push you a bit higher up the layer, more of an abstraction layer.

Due to Kubernetes, it's easy to move between the clouds, to move those jobs, especially in multi-cloud systems right now. So one of the disadvantages of EKS is because of the technology they use for their machine learning right now and we prefer to have options, like CPU and Google.

When we switched to EKS, historically it wasn't good. There were issues with bugs in it. They didn't have managed pools, which means small subsections of the clusters that you divided into pools like a mini-cluster in your cluster. However, now they have managed pools.

For the last several versions, the issue was with their kind of networking plug-in, the security plug-ins, and things like that. That EKS layer on top of the Kubernetes, they add themselves to each cloud, however, only with fewer standards and a little more issues. They need to work on the Amazon plugins on the Kubernetes cluster.

We just updated to a cluster 1.18, but we were on that cluster 1.13 which had many bugs and issues. Moving up to 1.19 in the middle of last year, we had some issues which they had to fix.

One thing that is probably not the greatest in Amazon is the ideology. They really want you to stick to cloud tools. They want you to use the managed version of the databases and our preference is to use the Kubernetes-managed databases. This doesn't fit well with the AWS philosophy, which is then passed on to the AWS engineers and they push that, push ideology on us as well, saying "You know what, we want you to use this database."

We're not dogmatic. If they want us to use a specific database, we use it, as the cluster is very dynamic. We don't need to deploy a database within a cluster, we can use the cloud database. To us, it's just a connection string, so it's not inefficient for us. It's just based on the client. However, you can see there's a little bit of an ideology dogma baked into the AWS philosophy just to keep you in the cloud. 

We've used the solution since it began. It's been a while.

Older versions haven't been so stable, however, they have been working on improving the latest solutions and it's getting much better.

The Kubernetes cluster is developed outside of the cloud, the core of it. The core of it has gotten much better and all the plugins that Amazon did, also have gotten better as well. One kind-of drives the other. It's a revolving, iterative process. You just have to be proactive and keep on updating your versions and manage your cluster a little bit better every time.

We don't have to deal with technical support at all. We haven't used them in the last six or seven years. There's nothing fundamentally wrong that we've found over the years that we have to call support. Almost everything is self-explanatory on the website. There really isn't a need to talk to them directly.

I also have some experience with Kubernetes and Google Cloud. Google Cloud has something called Google Cloud Run, which is very similar to Fargate. Both are trying to make your life much simpler so you don't have to look at the bare-bones infrastructure. It's easy.

The solution offers different pricing models. They charge in different ways  - either per CPU hour or usage based on a machine type. When it comes to pricing, Google may be two cents cheaper, whoever, the difference makes it a bit of a wash. It might mean an extra five dollars or 20 dollars a month. The difference isn't enough to be too noticeable. All of the main competitors charge very competitive pricing. 

That said, when it comes to the CPUs, that's a Google proprietary technology. When we do machine learning, we do prefer working in Google Cloud, as we have the option to expand all the way to CPU and AWS doesn't have that option. It's a GPU-only system. Amazon's also pushing you towards their own machine learning tool, SageMaker, which we don't want to use. We want to use our own tool.

We're not on the latest version. We are three or so versions back.

However, we're almost on the latest version, which may be 1.19. The version's no longer an issue. For us, the issue was that Amazon started with the ECS, the Elastic Container Services. Therefore, while we were using Kubernetes and then Google Cloud, for example, for a while and we had developed all the tools when a client came to us and said they wanted to cluster within the Amazon development cluster. That was the ECS. After that, Amazon added the EKS. Our first deployment in Amazon was on our own deployment of the cluster, not on any services. We didn't want to use the ECS, we wanted to use a cluster. We wanted a managed version, so we don't have to manage it ourselves, due to the fact that it's a little bit of a mess if you manage it.

I would advise new users to make sure that your cluster's secure. Make sure you're using a good networking configuration in your EKS. You need to get the NAT and the router going just on the subnet. You might have to pay for that. There are open-source tools to use, however, you can also pay for their monitoring.

When you have a development pipeline, we suggest having multiple clusters, not just one. Then you can really isolate your production cluster and make it really secure and maybe relax a little bit for your DEV and then QA, as you might want to have more things in there. You just need to make sure you remove those tools from your production box.

It's easier to have multiple clusters and really partition the cluster per environment, development, QA, testing environment, integration testing, whatever, and then you have your production environment, which is really kind of locked down so that nobody has access to it except specific people.

In general, I would rate this solution at an eight out of ten.

The solution can be described as a microservice, and it is also a fully containerized platform. The solution can be described as a stateless service. Amazon EKS can be a great solution for deployments since it supports autoscaling and keeps scaling as well. In my company, we only pay for the resources we use, and owing to such a concept, we use the solution in our company.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it allows developers to shift applications. The value of the solution is good when compared to tools deployed on an on-premises model.

If you compare Amazon EKS with OpenShift, the latter provides users with a solution that is fully managed through automation. Amazon EKS is not a solution that can be fully managed through automation, making it an area of concern where improvement is required. Amazon EKS should be manageable through a web portal or web interface, a feature that exists in OpenShift.

Amazon EKS should be available as a fully managed service since we use Helm chart to deploy the product in our company right now.

The initial setup phase of the product is an area where certain improvements can be made.

As a consultant, I use Amazon EKS, depending on the project requirements of my company. I have used Amazon EKS within the past twelve months. I am a customer of Amazon.

The stability of the solution is good. I can't comment much on the stability part of the solution since there is a different team in my company that takes care of the maintenance part of the solution.

I won't be able to comment on the scalability of the solution. I haven't had any reasons to deal with the product's scalability options.

I did not meet with any issues when trying to connect with the solution's technical support. At times, there may be some delays in response from the technical support team. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

In the past, I was using another solution. I switched to Amazon from a different solution. Amazon's support is good. Amazon also provides a number of managed services.

I rate the initial setup phase of the product a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The initial setup phase of the product was a bit difficult.

The solution is deployed on Jenkins and CI/CD.

The product's initial setup phase was taken care of by one of our company's in-house teams.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

It is challenging to host the applications in the existing VPC of the solution. They should include some essential configuration features to it.

We have been using the solution for the last two to three years.

It is a stable solution. I rate its stability as an eight or nine. Although, it is difficult to find a stable version sometimes.

It is a scalable solution. I rate its scalability as a ten. We can quickly scale the cluster as per requirements. We have medium and enterprise business clients using the solution.

The solution's customer service is excellent. They also provide detailed documentation.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is straightforward. It takes two to three days to deploy it in any infrastructure. We require one executive for implementation and around two executives for maintenance.

The solution is cheaper than AKS. Its license costs $73. The customers have to pay extra depending on the instances they want to deploy for hosting the application. I rate its pricing as a four.

I rate the solution as an eight. I advise others to use EKS ETL instead of AWS command prompt while deploying it.

The product helps to create a new environment fast. 

The tool helps us to provide greater access and also scale applications faster.

The product helps us to configure the new environment. 

The tool's setup is complex. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

I would rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

I would rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. My company has around 1000 users of the tool. We have plans to increase the usage in future. 

The tool's setup is difficult and requires experienced people. 

I would rate the tool a ten out of ten. The product is very easy to use since it is based on Kubernetes. It is a great tool for complex environments with multiple applications. 

It's mainly deployed on a public cloud.

The graphical user interface could be better.

I have used Amazon EKS for three years.

I would rate the stability as eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as eight out of ten.

I would rate technical support as eight out of ten.

I have also used Azure. Azure has a better graphical user interface than AWS and is more user-friendly. I'm able to get all of the services we need on Azure.

Initial setup is straightforward. It only takes 15 minutes to deploy.

Before setup, you need to understand the requirement, configuration, how many nodes are needed, and how much storage configuration is needed. You also need to understand the network requirement.

The price could be cheaper. I would rate it as seven out of ten.

There are no extra costs in addition to the standard license.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

I highly recommend Amazon EKS.

Our primary use case is for distribution computing.

The most valuable feature is the computing speed.

I would like to see the user interface improved because it is hard to find and not straightforward.

I have been using Amazon EKS for the past six months.

The current stability is very good.

There is sufficient scalability.

Our experience with technical support is hit or miss. They are really fast in responding but they do not always solve the main issue. Sometimes they do not have the proper training.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

I would recommend that you have enough knowledge of Kubernetes because you can not have basic training for that. You need to know the main concept of Kubernetes, and it will be much easier for you to use Amazon EKS. I would rate Amazon EKS a seven out of ten.

We just implemented the acquisition project for our cloud application environment, and we implemented Amazon EKS.

The most valuable feature is the cluster engine. It is also a feature in Kubernetes clusters, and we can't differentiate between the benefits in Amazon EKS and Kubernetes.

They should improve the security and include some cloud-native project integrations. In addition, they should enhance the Jira integration.

We have been using this solution for about two years, and it is deployed on cloud.

It is a stable solution.

Amazon EKS is scalable. When the usage increases, the EKS clusters immediately increase the number of ports and cluster nodes. Amazon EKS is ready for implementation, but the implementation depends on the number of clients. Our target is to increase our clients, and when that happens, the use of Amazon EKS will increase.

We have not needed technical support.

There is no installation required, but some implementation procedures and configurations are needed. The configuration is simple because Kubernetes manage it, and we do not drive all the Kubernetes clusters using a command line interface. We drive all the management activities with a user interface.

It's a subscription and depends on the cluster nodes and other effects. There are many calculation criteria for licensing.

There are a lot of criteria affecting why we switched to Amazon AWS. In addition to its features, it has computing services and app store services.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten and recommend it to others.

We use Amazon EKS to build integration projects and manage the infrastructure.  

Amazon EKS is compatible with Kubernetes API. I can use the autoscaling feature to manage and scale up infrastructure. I can monitor the cluster as well.

I encountered problems with the product’s documentation. Additionally, the CPU consumes a lot of memory. EKS could be modular like GCP as well.

We have been using Amazon EKS for one year.

The initial setup is more straightforward if you use the console.

I rate Amazon EKS’s pricing a nine out of ten. It costs around $200 and is expensive for the Brazilian market.

I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.