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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
3.3
Clients reduced costs significantly with AWS ECS, benefiting from efficient resource management and a pay-as-you-go model.
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
7.7
Amazon Elastic Container Service support is responsive and helpful, but costly with occasional expertise gaps and limited documentation.
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.
Head of Products at a tech services 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
7.2
Amazon ECS boasts strong scalability, praised for workload management, resource flexibility, yet noted for potential reactivity issues.
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 significant limitations regarding scalability.
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
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.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
Director at Taotesting
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon ECS is highly stable with minimal issues, though configuration adjustments may require technical expertise for optimal performance.
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 DevOps at Publicis Sapient
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Elastic Container Service struggles with reliability, user-friendliness, integration, and cost, requiring improved security and management simplification.
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.
A lower price for Amazon Elastic Container Service would be better, but it is comparable to other offerings in the market, so it is on par in that sense.
Head of Products at a tech services 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
I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners.
Solution Architect at Rutotech
 

Setup Cost

Amazon ECS features pay-as-you-go pricing, praised for scalability but sometimes costly compared to competitors, with no license fees.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers usage-based pricing with flexibility, but costs may rise with robust configurations and small deployments.
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.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.
Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA
Instead, we only pay for the hardware we use, which results in cost-cutting.
Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient
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 offers auto-scaling, cost-effectiveness, easy AWS integration, excellent security, and efficient resource management with Fargate support.
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.
Head of Products at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The redundancy afforded through Amazon's vast web services ecosystem is particularly valuable.
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
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
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
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
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
8th
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 January 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.3%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Google Kubernetes Engine2.3%
Amazon Elastic Container Service1.4%
Other96.3%
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 DevOps at Publicis Sapient
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
6%
Performing Arts
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise15
 

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?
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...
 

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: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.