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Amazon EKS 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
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
6.1
Google Kubernetes Engine is cost-effective, aiding efficiency and savings, though can be costly compared to AWS in certain aspects.
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.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
 

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
3.7
Google Kubernetes Engine support is inconsistent with mixed reviews; some praise, others criticize response times and suggest improvements.
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.
 

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
6.0
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for its robust scalability, handling both horizontal and vertical scaling efficiently, especially for microservices.
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.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
 

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
7.5
Google Kubernetes Engine is highly stable and reliable, with users appreciating its robust architecture and seamless cloud operations.
Amazon EKS is very stable, and when properly configured, I rate it ten out of ten.
Amazon EKS is stable.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EKS requires improvements in stability, user interface, integrations, support, pricing, automation, and configuration to enhance user experience.
Google Kubernetes Engine needs UI, security, documentation, integration, monitoring, cost reduction, network, AI, support, and Terraform improvements.
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.
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 EKS uses pay-as-you-go pricing, viewed as cost-effective by some but expensive by startups, with mixed affordability reviews.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers competitive pricing based on compute resources but can be costly for regional clusters and small deployments.
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.
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 EKS provides scalable, managed Kubernetes deployment with integration, serverless options, and enhanced security, focusing on business efficiency.
Google Kubernetes Engine offers auto-scaling, ease of deployment, and management with seamless Google Cloud integration and multi-cloud support.
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.
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 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)
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 EKS is 11.5%, down from 14.1% 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

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.
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.
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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
23%
Computer Software Company
11%
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 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 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 Elastic Kubernetes Service
GKE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GoDaddy, Pearson, FICO, Intuit, Verizon, Honeywell, Logicworks, RetailMeNot, LogMeIn, Conde Nast, mercari, Trainline, Axway
Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EKS vs. Google Kubernetes Engine and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.