Amazon EKS Reviews

As integrators, we are the user of Amazon EKS. Our customer's main use cases for Amazon EKS are mostly internal services automation and development and deployment automation, which we are using for the digital applications of our customers in the AWS cloud.

The most valuable features in Amazon EKS include a suite of different services, such as code versioning, pipelining, code deployment, and code quality checks; we are using the total suite of the Amazon EKS.

From a project management standpoint, the automated node provisioning feature in Amazon EKS helps to streamline the application deployment process because the benefit I see with this product is that our deployment turnaround time reduces considerably, and all compliance standards are met. Code quality is maintained, and there are specific indicators designed in the product to identify quality issues with minimal effort. The Agile mode of project execution methodologies can also be implemented due to the code version controls and pipelining controls.

Most importantly, the deployment side of code releases and release management features are maintained without major hassles, within a short span of time, and without delays to customer experience. From both operational management and project management angles, these tools address human as well as programming side hurdles, eliminating most gaps and enabling timely project execution without surprises and ensuring quick turnaround time while meeting delivery deadlines.

Amazon EKS's deep integration with AWS services such as Identity Access Management impacts the approach to security and compliance because it integrates with IAM authentication and the multi-factor authentication process, allowing access only to those who need it.

I recommend that Amazon EKS could be improved by integrating AI intelligence with its components because EKS or the Kubernetes cluster has not yet undergone an AI wrapper. An AI component integrated into Amazon EKS, such as failure analysis and intelligent recommendations when failures happen, would be very helpful. Although automation is present, this AI feature would enhance the overall capability.

I have been working with Amazon EKS for almost four or five years now.

I have not faced any challenges with Amazon EKS; it's good and quicker. Initially, implementation can be a bit time-consuming, but once set, it becomes a 'code it and forget it' sort of environment.

I have no complaints about the stability of Amazon EKS; it is good, with no concerns at this point in time.

Amazon EKS is good regarding scalability; it suits conventional services and has room for improvement with upcoming agentic AI and GenAI resources.

My experience with Amazon support is good; we always had a good association with them, so no concerns on that. I would rate the support of Amazon EKS above seven.

Positive

Customers have seen a return on investment with Amazon EKS because they are happy and see value in the services; however, as the volume grows, the OpEx cost also increases, so any respite on OpEx cost for customers with exponentially growing volumes would be helpful.

Regarding the cost of Amazon EKS, I would say it's relative to the organization based on release management processes; for big organizations where customer experience matters, such as in the retail segment, the cost can be very high due to numerous daily changes. For companies in telecom and retail, as Amazon is a pay-per-use service, our usage levels are high, so I would desire if Amazon could provide certain discounts or credits for customers who utilize a lot of resources.

Our customers use the solution on the Amazon AWS cloud. They purchase Amazon EKS through AWS only.

For those looking into using Amazon EKS, my advice is that it is a good product, although the downside is that if the volume grows, the OpEx cost increases significantly. I would strongly recommend it for small and medium companies. For big companies with more releases, it also attracts more OpEx costs, so if there is a mechanism to control costs, it can be suitable for everybody.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Amazon EKS an eight out of ten.

The use cases for the product involve provisioning of infrastructure and auto provisioning of infrastructure.

I have managed on-premise deployments in my use case with a Helm chart.

The biggest advantages of Amazon EKS include load balancing, auto scalability, and platform integration.

The solution includes automated node provisioning features.

The integration with AWS services involves platform services only.

We usually get deployed and only need to tweak the source code; however, I think the monitoring part and observability part could be improved.

I have been selling it for almost two years.

The scalability of Amazon EKS deserves a perfect rating of ten.

The technical support from Amazon deserves a rating of ten.

Positive

I would rate the ease of installing Amazon EKS in the middle area, giving it a five.

I have moved to pre-sales activity now.

I am selling Kubernetes Engine from Amazon.

I can rate Amazon EKS as nine because I just need to see some improvement.

I want to be a reference for Amazon.

The overall rating for Amazon EKS is 9 out of 10.

Amazon EKS is like Kubernetes, but it helps manage our nodes and scalability in AWS.

Amazon EKS should improve its integration. Our company does not maintain the external infrastructure.

Amazon EKS should include a graphic interface. Like there is a dashboard in Kubernetes, Amazon EKS should have a graphic interface that is more fluid, more fluent and contains more information.

I have been using Amazon EKS for six months.

Amazon EKS is a very stable solution.

I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten for stability.

Amazon EKS has high scalability. The solution has 10 to 15 endpoints in our organization. The solution is used 24/7 in our organization.

I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten for scalability.

Before Amazon EKS, I previously used OpenShift and Kubernetes-native.

The solution's initial setup depends on the application inside it. It's easy to have Kubernetes, but deploying other solutions with EKS is hard. It is easy to deploy Amazon EKS in general. I rate the solution an eight out of ten for the ease of its setup.

It took us half a day to deploy Amazon EKS. The solution's deployment depends on whether you want to use the Terraform ECR infrastructure. You have to go to the panel in AWS and deploy Amazon EKS. We needed an integrator for the first time, but then we did everything ourselves for the next deployments. Only one person is required for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Amazon EKS is quite pricey, but the functionality it provides is worth it. The solution has no additional costs, but it depends on the number of nodes used inside it. If we have a lot of traffic, we should scale many nodes, which would cost a lot.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

Overall, I rate Amazon EKS a nine out of ten.

I use this to develop my products. I use it internally in my company and in the other projects I have been working on for the deployment and managing the services which I'm deploying into the Amazon EKS infrastructure. I have not actually been involved with automated patching, as my role has predominantly been as a developer setting up how we deploy our applications into Kubernetes. That's primarily where I've gained experience, not on the server management side where the patching is done, so I'm not sure how the patching works or what benefits it could offer in that context. However, I can discuss how I manage my CI/CD pipelines, application deployment, and how I use Amazon EKS for deployment. That is the part I have experience with.

I have been using Amazon EKS, and I started with ECS first, which is the Elastic Container Service where I can deploy my workloads. ECS is also one of other managed services from AWS, but it is not supporting Kubernetes. We wanted a platform where we could have an orchestration platform for Kubernetes. Hosting our own Kubernetes server is a very tedious job. Kubernetes itself is a very complex tool to manage and requires a lot of resources and knowledge to build a working solution. That's where Amazon EKS comes into the picture as a managed service built on top of a Kubernetes engine, offering many tools, such as CLI integrated tools or through their console to quickly set up a Kubernetes cluster, which otherwise is a tedious job.

With that offering, it is very easy to set up the Kubernetes cluster in Amazon EKS, and it is very easy to manage the nodes we have there, such as what instances we need. Since it's an AWS offering, we select a variety of EC2 instances available, and it integrates with it nicely. The same applies to the infrastructure as a service tool, IaaS, such as Terraform. It is very easy to create and manage Amazon EKS clusters through Terraform. Overall, it offers a lot of tooling and saves a lot of time compared to setting up and managing a Kubernetes server ourselves.

A specific feature of Amazon EKS is that Kubernetes is open source, and all its capabilities are based on that. The main advantage is launching and managing a Kubernetes server becomes very easy, as I receive out-of-the-box support for other AWS service integrations with Amazon EKS. For example, services such as AWS IAM directly integrate whenever I want to set up access control or security measures on my Kubernetes server. EC2 offers out-of-the-box support when setting up Kubernetes nodes. All this setup we need to do otherwise becomes much easier with Amazon EKS.

Regarding measuring the impact of Amazon EKS on my organization's ability to manage complex workflows effectively, there are measurable metrics we use. Whenever we set up any project, it is crucial to ensure we understand the availability and scalability of our applications. When I set up any application, I look at how we will be able to scale whenever there is a requirement for higher loads. To measure the Amazon EKS platform's effectiveness in this regard, I evaluate the different methods available for scaling the application. For instance, based on CPU and memory consumption, I can scale or use scalability tools such as KEDA. KEDA helps us scale based on various factors, such as the number of requests my application receives or the load on my service based on metrics. These tools can be easily installed on my Amazon EKS server without restrictions. Availability is crucial when setting up a Kubernetes cluster, especially when designing for a global audience using Amazon AWS. The options to configure multi-region and multi-AZ setups are incredibly valuable, as these features ensure high availability without complex traditional setups required for on-premise hosting.

One area I observed during setup was that while managing it through CLI and Terraform, there are many possibilities for setup and infrastructure updates. However, I believe the console experience could improve. In the AWS console, when trying to set up an Amazon EKS cluster, there were limitations on certain features I encountered a few months back while checking. EKS frequently updates, so I don't know if there's a new release. However, I found some features that I could not manage through the console, requiring me to use CLI or Terraform. It would be beneficial if we could have all features supported through the console, providing full management capabilities there.

I have been working with this tool for around two years now.

My current organization has not been using self-healing nodes, but I have used it in some earlier projects and organizations I worked with. When we decided to move away from containerization services such as ECS, we wanted a better orchestration platform that could easily handle those requirements. Kubernetes comes with many features for scalability, which otherwise we would have to manage ourselves with scripts. While Kubernetes is a good choice, it comes with its own learning curve, and understanding all the details is a big task. Services such as Amazon EKS, or maybe GKE for Google, provide the confidence that we will benefit from the orchestration framework that Kubernetes offers while also setting it up and managing it easily. We gain all the advantages that Kubernetes has as an engine without having to invest a great deal of time learning and configuring everything thanks to managed services such as Amazon EKS.

Regarding technical support, I recall one instance with Amazon EKS. I faced an issue with configuring pods in EKS that required access to other AWS services, such as IAM roles or S3 buckets. The setup was through OIDC providers in EKS, which set up trust relationships with IAM roles. There was a problem with OIDC provider setup a few years back when EKS was newer. I reached out, and I received good support when I submitted a ticket for the issues with the OIDC provider. They helped resolve the issues related to the trust relationship, identifying mistakes that needed fixing.

Positive

In my current company, I don't use it, but in my earlier company, we started with ECS, another AWS offering where we deployed our containers. However, as our deployment expanded, the limitations in scalability prompted us to explore better options. We began to reach a point where more than 30 or 40 instances of our services were running, and there was a need to support these across different regions. ECS offered some level of scalability, but it was not as customizable as Kubernetes, so we decided to transition from ECS to Amazon EKS to harness its full capabilities.

Using Amazon EKS as a cluster is free. The pricing only applies when I add the instances and set up nodes. For instance, when I add memory-optimized nodes, the applicable AWS pricing for those instances comes into play. Essentially, the pricing revolves around the nodes added, not the other configurations I'm attempting to set up.

Regarding the pricing of nodes, I find that it generally offers good value. I'm not certain what the comparative costs look against other platforms, such as OCI from Oracle that is known to offer lower pricing, but it ultimately depends. For example, AWS has recently introduced Graviton-based servers, which claim to be cost-saving, although I haven't used them myself. AWS provides several options, allowing me to choose configurations that suit my needs regarding CPU and memory. While I don't have firm details about enterprise pricing options or upfront reservations that may provide discounts, what I appreciate is the flexibility in selecting from various instance categories to meet specific requirements.

Based on my experience with Amazon EKS support, I would rate it a nine out of ten overall.

We use Amazon EKS to manage containerization within our microservices environment.

The product's most valuable features are scalability, observability, and performance.

They could add logging features. At present, we use external tools to increase and decrease the number of instances.

We have been using Amazon EKS for three years.

It is a stable service. We never encountered system downtime.

In organizational environments, especially when utilizing the console, EKS is the primary choice. Out of ten clients, approximately eight opt for EKS due to its scalability and robust features.

We contacted AWS support for EKS when we encountered difficulties connecting to private subnets. The support team guided us through the necessary steps to address these issues.

Scalability and security considerations drove the decision to migrate to EKS from another product.

The initial setup was straightforward, especially when Terraform was utilized to generate the setup. We must make minor adjustments, such as changing the name and configuring VPN settings. Overall, it's a relatively easy task for me.

The platform is worth the investment.

The product pricing depends on the specific requirements. For instance, clients between $3000-$4000 per month might find the pricing reasonable, with clusters priced around $70 to $80 plus additional costs. However, the actual pricing can vary based on the number of services utilized.

With numerous tools and plugins available for EKS like Graphite and Prometheus, users can effectively manage logs and monitor performance.

For beginners, it's essential to grasp the fundamentals of Docker and containerization and understand how containers operate. Once these basics are clear, the next step is to familiarize oneself with Kubernetes and container orchestration concepts.

I rate it a nine out of ten.

I use the solution for its microservices. I used the product in some of my personal projects for deploying applications. From an organizational standpoint, the product is useful for its microservices.

When it comes to Amazon EKS, there are IAM permissions and RBAC. When you create an IAM user, you give the privileges on the cluster level, but there won't be anything inside the clusters. In the clusters and their respective files, you will have to map the IAM user created with the help of AWS. The documentation part of the product is an area of concern that needs to be made easier from an improvement perspective.

I have experience with the tool for the past six to eight months. For some of my personal projects, I have been using the product for a year and a half. I am a customer of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The product's initial setup phase is easy since it is only based on a one-line command to help you set up an EKS cluster.

The product is available at such a huge scale in the market since the resources that are offered under the tool are competitively priced and available at a much cheaper rate compared to other solutions.

One of the aspects of Kubecost and Amazon EKS is that you don't have to manage the master node. The scalability and connectivity between API servers and its resources, including its scheduler and controller, are all taken care of by AWS. Not being easily able to log in to your master node makes things secure.

I found the cluster autoscaler of AWS to be very helpful. It is easier for users since the cluster autoscaler takes care of the nodes, making everything easy for me. With the cluster autoscaler, all the resources are presented to me, so I need not consider any integrations from the outside environment. The aforementioned reasons made it easy for me to set up the software and scale down the resources easily.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. Kubernetes is a product from Google, which offers good compatibility. Kubernetes and its compatibility with Amazon is decent enough for users, in my opinion.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

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.

We use EKS in our company to run containerized applications. I work in the container ecosystem team, and we manage EKS clusters for our developer teams so they don't have to. We provide them with the necessary tools to run on top of the cluster.

EKS helps us simplify and speed up cluster management. We don't have to take care of cluster updates; we just initiate the update, and AWS handles it. The same goes for some of the AWS-managed add-ons.

The biggest improvement is that we now have more time. When we shifted the responsibility of cluster management and updates to AWS, we had more time to develop solutions that make life easier for the developers. 

Application deployment is more automatic. They don't have to issue cluster commands; they can simply do a commit into our internal GitHub Enterprise, and our tooling will deploy or update the application on the cluster. That's probably the biggest benefit because we had time to develop such solutions.

From my personal perspective, I think it's good that we can use AWS CLI to manage the cluster, and that way, we can automate the work via scripts. Of course, the way that we just issue a command and AWS handles the work, like with cluster updates, is also valuable. That's probably one of the reasons why we use it.

Sometimes I have trouble because, in our corporate network, there are various networks, etcetera. It's difficult to connect to some of the clusters, and it's easier to go through the UI when troubleshooting something. At some points, the UI seems limited to me with the functions it provides. 

You can get information like what kind of port is running on the cluster, but I haven't really explored the UI so far, so it's difficult for me to see the logs, for example. Or sometimes, you are only limited to the basic Kubernetes things. 

We have certain customizations installed in the cluster, and for that, you really have to use kubectl from the command line. You are not able to use the EKS UI to list certain custom resources. So maybe there can be some kind of improvement, but maybe it's just me that I haven't really explored the UI that much.

I have been using it since February. 

I don't really remember any issue with EKS, the product from AWS as is. There can be some issues when there is a bigger outage on the AWS side; it's either some kind of network outage when we cannot reach AWS itself or something similar, but I wouldn't blame EKS for it.

When we had problems with the cluster itself, I think it was more about some issue that either we as a team introduced by human error, from some configuration mistake, or our customers sometimes made mistakes. And maybe there are issues when the application running on top of EKS somehow gets into some loop or something and then doesn't work correctly, but I wouldn't really attribute that to EKS.

Because I've been in the team for a short amount of time, I don't really remember any big issue that was caused by EKS itself in the past six months at least.

It is scalable. We use the cluster autoscaler tool that spins up a new node when we need more, and that works nicely. So I think from the scalability point of view, it's okay. 

In the last six months, I don't really see any issue with scalability. We run around one hundred clusters. Some of them are quite small, really just the basics where we are running free master nodes in the free availability zones, just to make things according to best practices. So, really a minimal cluster. 

And there are also some really big clusters with over a hundred worker nodes. Overall, I think it's quite big. And with EKS, we are able to manage it quite well.

I have some experience with AWS support, and it was good. We were trying to solve something with one of the add-ons, and I think we solved it within a couple of days. We even had a call with one of the support engineers. So I think it worked out well. 

The issue was regarding one of the AWS-managed add-ons. I remember that we clearly had some kind of misunderstanding between us and technical support, and it seemed like either we were not able to explain it correctly or the guy wasn't able to understand us. But I remember that somehow we solved that issue. So at the end, it was okay.

Neutral

The deployment process of EKS was done before I joined the team.

For me, EKS UI is nice, and it was quite easy for me to get familiar with. I find the AWS CLI quite nice to use as well. I've been working in IT for some time now, so I have some level of experience. I guess these things come sort of naturally to me now, such as how to use the tools that are provided by companies. It's usually no issue for me.

From the maintenance point of view, I don't know much about how things are backed up, etcetera. I think that is exactly why we use EKS because we don't really have to take care of cluster backups. We can simply issue a command, and the cluster will update. If we were to do cluster updates manually, it would be more work. We would have to update the worker nodes and then update the master node one by one. AWS now handles all of this. So I think from the maintenance point of view, it's great, and that's why we use it because it's now much more simple and faster for us.

We still see the benefits of using this solution because we are using it. And we actually plan to transfer all our workloads to EKS if things were ideal. But for some legal reasons, we still have to manage some on-premise clusters, but I think the benefits are there.

If you have the money, I would recommend the EKS product to other users who are looking into implementing it. It's a good tool. It really takes some of the management burden off your back.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.