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Amazon EKS vs Amazon Elastic Container Service 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
6.9
Amazon EKS provides cost-effective, secure, and flexible cloud services, leading to significant savings and operational benefits over on-premises solutions.
Sentiment score
4.5
Organizations save costs and time using Amazon Elastic Container Service with Fargate, enhancing financial gains and reliability.
We have cost explorer available, and a bill forecast based on usage allows us to determine whether resources are underutilized or overutilized.
It's a fast deployment, with very good documentation, and it's really helpful.
I can recommend using it to save costs and for faster deployment, better performance, security, and easy clustering.
This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EKS offers efficient support, especially for paying users, though some experience delays or issues with non-priority 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.
We have a paid subscription that provides priority support.
Amazon's technical support is quite good, especially for those who purchase support services.
Having to know what questions to ask is essential.
We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EKS is praised for its scalability, flexibility, efficient cluster management, and automated scaling tools, meeting diverse business demands.
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.
The ability to scale based on requirements by deploying additional containers is a strong point for Kubernetes.
This allows us to scale our applications or APIs as needed, offering reliability through the automation of scaling processes.
It can scale very well according to needs, and it doesn't have any issues with scalability.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.
Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has significant limitations regarding scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EKS is highly reliable and stable, especially with proper configuration, despite occasional network issues, often scoring 8-10.
Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon ECS is highly stable, with ratings 8-10, minimal bugs, 99.99% uptime, praised reliability, and some configuration issues.
Amazon EKS is very stable, and when properly configured, I rate it ten out of ten.
Amazon EKS is stable.
The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EKS requires improvements in stability, user interface, integrations, support, pricing, automation, and configuration to enhance user experience.
Amazon ECS needs cost transparency, reliability, usability improvements, enhanced security, better integration, and streamlined monitoring and scaling features.
Simplifying these will enable more people, not just those with strong foundational knowledge, to work effectively with these services.
Amazon EKS can be improved by having the maintenance of Kubernetes versions managed better, as everything is handled by the Kubernetes team and possibly a separate team at AWS.
Adding logging would be a valuable improvement.
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 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.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EKS uses pay-as-you-go pricing, viewed as cost-effective by some but expensive by startups, with mixed affordability reviews.
Amazon ECS offers flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, valued for scalability, though costs may rise unexpectedly due to misconfigurations.
The pricing structure is beneficial for large companies who pay for what they use, but it is not affordable for startups.
Now, it stands at six or seven due to optimizing our workload.
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.
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.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EKS provides scalable, managed Kubernetes deployment with integration, serverless options, and enhanced security, focusing on business efficiency.
Amazon ECS offers scalable, cost-effective container management with AWS integration, Fargate simplification, and reliable, secure, zero-downtime operation.
The most beneficial aspect of Amazon EKS is that it helps manage the Kubernetes master node, so I don't need to maintain the master node, including tasks like upgrading.
The main benefits that I received from using Amazon EKS are that it is a managed cluster and offers simplicity.
By default, if you just install Amazon EKS, you can deploy your application, but to have it enterprise-ready, you have to configure a number of other things that will boost productivity.
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 makes horizontal scaling easy and is especially effective when working under the ECS service.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EKS
Ranking in Container Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (18th)
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon EKS is 11.5%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Rock Wang - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing complex environments effortlessly while focusing on growth
The most beneficial aspect of Amazon EKS is that it helps manage the Kubernetes master node, so I don't need to maintain the master node, including tasks like upgrading. This allows me to focus on business code. If using services like Fargate, I only need to maintain my workload, simply uploading code that will be deployed to the Kubernetes cluster. This is especially beneficial for startup companies that lack the technical resources to manage the Kubernetes cluster. Furthermore, Amazon EKS allows me to utilize Kubernetes cluster-level expansion. If there’s insufficient resource on a machine, the cluster can automatically expand to add new nodes.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EKS?
The product's most valuable features are scalability, observability, and performance.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EKS?
My experience with pricing for Amazon EKS is limited as there's a separate team for that, and I do not have much knowledge of specifics. However, the pricing is based on the instance type we use in...
What needs improvement with Amazon EKS?
We usually get deployed and only need to tweak the source code; however, I think the monitoring part and observability part could be improved.
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.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GoDaddy, Pearson, FICO, Intuit, Verizon, Honeywell, Logicworks, RetailMeNot, LogMeIn, Conde Nast, mercari, Trainline, Axway
Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EKS vs. Amazon Elastic Container Service and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.