Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
4.5
Organizations save costs and time using Amazon Elastic Container Service with Fargate, enhancing financial gains and reliability.
Sentiment score
6.1
Google Kubernetes Engine delivers positive ROI by reducing costs and improving efficiency, despite being costly for some services.
This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Feedback on Amazon Elastic Container Service's support is mixed, with fast response varying by subscription, affecting cost and expertise.
Sentiment score
3.7
Google Kubernetes Engine support varies; some users rely on forums, while others suggest improvements in response time and professionalism.
We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.3
Amazon Elastic Container Service offers impressive scalability with some limitations, excelling in high-traffic applications but lagging in auto-scaling reactivity.
Sentiment score
6.0
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for its scalability, efficient for microservices, with dynamic auto-scaling adjusting to organizational needs.
Small REST APIs, containerized databases, and simple front-end solutions are possible, but larger applications requiring more resources are not feasible.
Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon ECS is highly stable, with ratings 8-10, minimal bugs, 99.99% uptime, praised reliability, and some configuration issues.
Sentiment score
7.5
Google Kubernetes Engine is highly stable, effectively managing demands with regular updates and scalable architecture for reliable operations.
The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.
A suitable option would be N2D or beyond, which can onboard all the workloads quickly.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon ECS needs cost transparency, reliability, usability improvements, enhanced security, better integration, and streamlined monitoring and scaling features.
Google Kubernetes Engine needs enhancements in security, user interface, scalability, pricing, and third-party integration for optimal performance.
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.
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.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon ECS offers flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, valued for scalability, though costs may rise unexpectedly due to misconfigurations.
Google Kubernetes Engine uses pay-as-you-go pricing, competitive with AWS, considering machine specs, compute resources, and optional GPUs.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.
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.
Instead, we only pay for the hardware we use, which results in cost-cutting.
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon ECS offers scalable, cost-effective container management with AWS integration, Fargate simplification, and reliable, secure, zero-downtime operation.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers seamless autoscaling, multi-cloud support, robust security, and easy cluster management for enhanced performance and reliability.
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.
Amazon Elastic Container Service allows the opportunity for low cost, as it is less expensive than EC2, to get used to all these concepts, paradigms, and techniques.
Additionally, it provides excellent horizontal scalability.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
What I find most valuable is the ability to focus solely on my product without worrying about the Kubernetes infrastructure itself.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Container Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

FABIO NAGAO - PeerSpot reviewer
Horizontal scaling is streamlined when deploying modern workloads
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. This limitation makes it challenging to define a balanced scale-out automation since a well-written software should balance between processing and memory.
Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Container Service?
Implementing the product has helped me monitor the parameters. I utilize tools like CloudWatch and AWS systems to track these parameters. If any issues arise, I alert our developer team to address ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Container Service?
The solution must improve backup and compatibility around OS like Windows and Mac.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
Google Kubernetes Engine solution is expensive, as are all cloud solutions in general. On a scale of one to ten for pricing, I would rate it between seven and eight.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
I have no comment about the learning curve of Google Kubernetes Engine. Regarding AI integration and features in Google Kubernetes Engine, there are currently none available. I would appreciate see...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
GKE
 

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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.