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 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.

The main reasons for using Amazon EKS in our use were third-party solutions that were distributed as Helm charts. We were using Rancher to manage multi-cloud deployment for unification. We are also using it for evaluation purposes, building customer pilots and prototypes. Sometimes it is easy to make the build chain run through and come out as images and deploy them into Kubernetes.

It completely depends on use case. If you have got a very dynamic or a requirement to scale very fast with nodes, then Amazon EKS is a very good choice because you have got that reach and the ability to scale quickly. But if you have got a fairly static load, it becomes quite expensive quite quickly. They are expensive CPU cycles.

The main benefit of Amazon EKS is its rapid deployment. The fact that we can deploy it very quickly with infrastructure as code and then tear it down again when we are finished.

There is no real advantage to us from Amazon EKS because the advantage is the fact that we have a unified management product so we can deploy concurrently into multiple clouds and on-prem out of one pane of glass. That is the key thing there. As far as the development and presentation, sometimes it is easy just to load it up through kube control, sometimes you put it through a GUI control in front.

We have not been using it from the point of the application using the IAM. We have been using it because quite often our customers are tied back to usually Entra ID and things like that.

The only concerns I had with Amazon EKS were related to cost, the usual problem you have with cloud. It is fine if you can exploit it for dynamic loads, bring it up, get rid of it again. That is where its strength is. You pay for that premium, but as far as running the thing under constant load, it is a very expensive way of deploying.

In the early days, there were a couple of vulnerabilities exploited from the single control plane per region. So there is nothing stopping me deploying multi-region, and that means multiple control planes. So I could deal with that, the infrastructure handled the criticality. The only thing that I could possibly run into a problem with, which I have not had to at this point, but architecturally, is with regulated technologies, banks, that sort of stuff where you cannot be single provider sensitive.

We have been dealing with it from the beginning almost, since 2019.

Only in the past I think it had issues. The fact that regions only had a single control plane left a little bit of vulnerability in there, certainly in the early days, but I do not think that matters now. They seem to have solved that.

I had no problem. It was stable. Very stable.

It was very easy to scale.

The current stuff I am working with has been Kubernetes and building out operational software using Kubernetes. I was actually reviewing Nutanix as an option for some of the stuff I was building out.

Mainly on-prem, we are doing production work with a number of customers. We support them, we run an operational arm as well. I have been involved in platforming on Kubernetes, but we happily support any variant. We are cloud agnostic. So these distributions, we would use Amazon EKS or AKS, but not for long.

The driver in Rancher, as long as I do not have anything extremely different or complex, works completely the same whether I am driving the application onto Amazon EKS or onto a local on-prem.

We have not been using the automated patching. If we were in anger, we do not run the stuff long enough in Amazon EKS at the moment. Really, it is just up in demo and then torn down again. A lot of the stuff is being driven from other automation anyway, more infrastructure as code stuff. So that actually just gets driven completely in there.

I think that Amazon, every other provider, is adapting to the changes in the market now because the major cloud benefits are now fully saturated. Nobody else is going in for those benefits. They are starting to hit the reality of regulated technologies that are high value cannot be under a single provider. So a single cloud provider is not sufficient to support critical industry anymore. You have to have either multiple cloud or hybrid just to meet regulation in the future. So that constrains some of the flexibility. But the clouds are all working towards more on-prem extension, that sort of thing to make it more feasible.

I would rate Amazon EKS a six out of ten. I have a particular penchant for not actually overscoring anymore because of the way that people use this stuff. In other words, I consider adequate doing what it says they claim it to do. So that is a five or a six as they did what they said they would do. There is nothing wrong with that. It is what we agreed. I paid for it, they delivered it. I am satisfied.

My main use cases for Amazon EKS are securing the clusters and providing mesh gateways between the clusters.

The features that I find useful in Amazon EKS are Istio, Webhooks, service accounts, and ReplicaSets with different service accounts and accounts that we work with.

The main benefits that I received from using Amazon EKS are that it is a managed cluster and offers simplicity.

I am not the right person to ask what could be improved in Amazon EKS to make this tool better for the next release. A continuation of the managed pieces would be beneficial because there is no integration of clusters. They are all separate with no real managed cluster type of capability.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for about 3 and 1/2 to 4 years.

The initial setup for Amazon EKS is not straightforward. Kubernetes is not an easy technology because there are many technologies in the cluster. You need to understand infrastructure code to deploy it and understand all of the requirements alongside it. You cannot simply request deployment of EKS clusters as it does not work that way.

I would rate the setup for Amazon EKS as a three because I need to have other technologies and other tool sets to make it work. I cannot just go through Amazon's console and request a three-node cluster deployment because that does not work.

Regarding stability, Amazon EKS is stable. Once it is up, it works. I would rate it as a nine.

For scalability, Amazon EKS is scalable. I would rate it as a nine.

I have never contacted customer support for any issues on Amazon EKS.

Neutral

The solutions I evaluated before working with Amazon EKS include Grafana, Prometheus, K9s, Istio, and Consul.

The main benefits in Amazon EKS compared to those tools are that it is a different tool set completely, and they provide better visibility and connectivity.

The initial setup for Amazon EKS is not straightforward. Kubernetes is not an easy technology because there are many technologies in the cluster. You need to understand infrastructure code to deploy it and understand all of the requirements alongside it. You cannot simply request deployment of EKS clusters as it does not work that way.

I would rate the setup for Amazon EKS as a three because I need to have other technologies and other tool sets to make it work. I cannot just go through Amazon's console and request a three-node cluster deployment because that does not work.

I suggest understanding the entire form before understanding Kubernetes. I would rate Amazon EKS as a seven out of ten because Kubernetes across all CSPs is complicated. I do not think it is an easy technology to give it anything more than a seven.

Neutral

Amazon EKS can be used to implement and create clusters. It is also used to deploy and secure the already configured applications. EKS is a cloud-based container management service that integrates with Kubernetes to deploy applications. It automatically manages and scales clusters of infrastructure resources on AWS with Kubernetes.

EKS eliminates the need to install, operate, or maintain a Kubernetes control plane on AWS. Amazon handles everything. We just need to know how we can make it more secure, and we can use it to deploy your applications. It scales automatically, making it one of the best services.

Assigning roles and responsibilities to interact with a created cluster as a user over a command prompt is cumbersome on AWS. Initially, we create a user to interact with a cluster. Since everyone can't use the cluster, we need to assign some permissions to that specific user. It is very cumbersome to assign permissions to users to interact with a cluster. We always get errors, and it takes many days to resolve that permission issue before the user can start interacting with the cluster.

I have been using Amazon EKS for eight years.

Amazon EKS is a stable solution.

Amazon EKS is a scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution’s initial setup is easy, but assigning permissions to users is difficult.

Amazon EKS is not a cheap solution.

Google Cloud Platform has a service similar to EKS called GKE. It's very easy to implement permissions in GKE as compared to EKS.

Overall, I rate Amazon EKS a seven 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.