No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
2.4
Amazon Elastic Container Service offers cost-effective scalability, operational savings, and ROI, especially benefiting larger companies with integrated services.
Sentiment score
4.8
Google Kubernetes Engine offers cost efficiency and productivity, though additional service costs and competition may affect returns.
This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
Director at Taotesting
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon ECS support is responsive and friendly, but pricing is high and documentation initially lacking for complex issues.
Sentiment score
3.3
User satisfaction with Google Kubernetes Engine support is mixed, with some praising efficiency and others noting delays and challenges.
AWS partnership provides access to their architects for guidance when needed.
Chief Data Scientist at Ngenux
The customer support is good.
Lead DevSecOps Engineer & Founder of Spiderthings Solutions at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon ECS excels in scalability with autoscaling and EKS, though some note slower scaling for large applications.
Sentiment score
5.0
Google Kubernetes Engine excels in scalability, supporting dynamic scaling for enterprises and cloud platforms, ideal for diverse applications.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has significant limitations regarding scalability.
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
Director at Taotesting
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
Amazon Elastic Container Service is highly stable with minimal downtime and praised for reliability, though user expertise impacts experiences.
Sentiment score
7.4
Google Kubernetes Engine is stable, with minimal downtime and consistent performance, appreciated for scalability and adaptability across environments.
The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
If I have 100 replicas of containers and the traffic suddenly pushes to 1,000 within a fraction of a second, the selected machine type must be fast.
Cloud Associate Dev Ops at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon ECS needs improvements in orchestration, UI, logging, pricing, documentation, load balancing, autoscaling, monitoring, encryption, and compatibility.
Users suggest improvements in pricing, upgrades, interface, security, support, integration, backup, and performance visibility for Google Kubernetes Engine.
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.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
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.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
They did not previously provide the ability to change the target group and load balancer after a deployment, but now they do.
Lead DevSecOps Engineer & Founder of Spiderthings Solutions at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
Consultant at HSBC
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
Director at Taotesting
 

Setup Cost

Amazon ECS is cost-effective with pay-as-you-go pricing but can be expensive if misconfigured, offering good value.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers usage-based pricing with flexibility, but costs may rise with robust configurations and small deployments.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
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.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, the evergreen AWS is a definite win.
Lead DevSecOps Engineer & Founder of Spiderthings Solutions at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Instead, we only pay for the hardware we use, which results in cost-cutting.
Cloud Associate Dev Ops at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
Director at Taotesting
 

Valuable Features

Amazon ECS provides seamless container management with features like service discovery, auto-scaling, and AWS integration for cost-efficient deployments.
Google Kubernetes Engine excels with auto-scaling, easy deployment, integration, security, and reduced complexity for seamless application 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.
General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.
Main benefits that Amazon Elastic Container Service provides include saving maintenance costs in terms of saving time, and since it auto scales, we save on infrastructure costs by running at lower instances when it is not heavily used.
Chief Data Scientist at Ngenux
Availability is the most valuable feature because if containers are hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service, they are truly available and do not go down.
Manager, Engineering at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The best advantage of Google Kubernetes Engine is that it manages Kubernetes for you, making everything related to the master nodes managed for you with automatic updating and upgrading.
Solution Architect at Rutotech
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Consultant at HSBC
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Container Management
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 3.1%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Google Kubernetes Engine3.1%
Amazon Elastic Container Service1.8%
Other95.1%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

AG
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
Starts strong with functionalities but reveals cost limitations
The main challenge with Amazon Elastic Container Service is the significant learning curve. Everything mentioned took months to understand. It is not for the faint of heart. Though they have graphical interfaces and numerous dashboards that help create all the services graphically, learning to use Bash can be challenging. Because these are headless servers by nature, there is no graphical interface. It is not similar to Windows where you can hit the start button and look for your program, or Mac where you can look for programs on your desktop. Instead, users must understand this new paradigm of a Linux headless server, which requires using command-based prompts for builds and development.
Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Associate Dev Ops at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects
Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Container Management solutions are best for your needs.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Container Service?
As for how Amazon Elastic Container Service can be improved, I currently find there is not much lacking since I can identify everything I need from Amazon Elastic Container Service container itself...
What is your primary use case for Amazon EC2 Container Service?
My main use case for Amazon Elastic Container Service is deploying microservices-based applications with different technologies.A quick specific example of a project or application I have deployed ...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EC2 Container Service?
I would rate Amazon Elastic Container Service as a nine out of ten.I give it a nine out of ten because, although it is not a direct alternative, it is indirectly an alternative to Kubernetes, which...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
The price could be a bit cheaper. I don't see anything with Google Kubernetes Engine that needs to be improved. I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners. Howe...
What is your primary use case for Google Kubernetes Engine?
I use Google Kubernetes Engine for many purposes, most notably for websites, but the websites are microservices. However, some mega projects have many machines that needed to be containerized, so w...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
GKE, Google Kubernetes
 

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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.